Are they actually producing new math? In the most recent ACM issue there was an article about testing AI against a math bench that was privately built by mathematicians, and what they found is that even though AI can solve some problems, it never truly has come up with something novel and new in mathematics, it is just good at drawing connections between existing research and putting a spin on it.
I'm not accusing you in particular, but I feel like there's a lot of circular reasoning around this point. Something like: AI can't discover "new math" -> AI discovers something -> since it was discovered by AI it must not be "new math" -> AI can't discover "new math"
There is a kind of rubrik I use on stuff like this. If LLMs are discovering new math, why have I only read one or two articles where it's happening? Wouldn't it be happening with regularity?
The most obvious example of this thinking is, if LLMs are replacing developers, why us open ai still hiring?
I can only say that at family meetings, I hear people talk about contracting with a shop that used to have 4 web designers, but now it's 1 guy, delivering 4x faster than before.
It's finding constructions and counterexamples. That's different from finding new proof techniques, but still extremely useful, and still gives way to novel findings.
Pete didn’t just vibe code, he took his many years of engineering experience and applied it to build a ton of products, pushing the boundaries of todays models and harnesses.
I am saddened that the top post is about jealousy, do so many people feel this way? Jealousy should be something that when we feel we reflect on privately and work on because it is an emotion that leads to people writing criticism like tbis that is biased due to their emotional state.
I noticed that this week. I have a very straightforward claude command that lists exact steps to follow to fetch PR comments to bring them into the context window. Stuff like step one call gh pr view my/repo and it would call it with anthropiclabs/repo instead, it wouldn’t follow all the instructions, it wouldn’t pass the exact command I had written. I pointed out the mistake and it goes oh you are right! Then proceeded to make the same mistake again.
I used this command with sonnet 4.5 too and have never had a problem until this week. Something changed either in the harness or model. This is not just vibes. Workflows I have run hundreds of times have stopped working with Opus 4.5
I just hit 25 books read for the year which was my goal for 2025. To make it happen I did a few things:
- Listen to audiobooks when doing chores (dishes, laundry, mowing the lawn)
- Keep a book on me and use a bookmark. Being able to quickly open and read a page or two when I would normally doom scroll on my phone
- Rather than watch TV at night or play video games, read instead
- Use goodreads to track progress and add my friends who are readers to provide motivation and goal visualization.
This year has been quite enjoyable and I have found my reading tastes evolve over time. For a while I was reading books like the ones on this list, self-help, business/management/leadership focused, and memoirs. I then got bored and moved into fantasy, and now I have been getting into history.
Fascinating article. As I was reading it, particularly the part about his son John saying his father was very loving and was there for him, but also saying he did not like to be interrupted during his work or reading, and would say "Go away! I am reading!" immediately made me think he was quite narcissistic. His work was more important than even his own son. Later on his brother Dennis confirmed my suspicions that McCarthy was a narcissist. I have an insatiable curiosity as well and truly love learning, but in being a christian I have actively worked against my tendency to narcissism. A life like McCarthys sounds romantically fabulous, but when you think about the end of it, four people around your bed, it sounds tragic. There is something profound in sacrificially loving others and it doesn’t seem like Cormac experienced that. Though I am sure his wives, brother Dennis, and son John, did.
There's nothing wrong with having boundaries. Anyways, the quote goes on:
"But he was a great father, always there for me, and I learned so much from him. We would have these long conversations about science and history and music, and whatever else, and he was the funniest person I’ve ever met, just a natural comedian.” "
In my experience, transcription software has no problem with transcribing sped up audio, or audio that is inaudible to humans or extremely loud (as long as not clipped), I wonder if LLM transcription works the same.
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