[fnordpiglet]

I actually think this “cheating” is fine. In fact it’s preferable. I don’t need an AI that can act as a really expensive calculator or solver. We’ve already built really good calculators and solvers that are near optimal. What has been missing is the abductive ability to successfully use those tools in an unconstrained space with agency. I find really no value in avoiding the optimal or near optimal techniques we’ve devised rather than focusing on the harder reasoning tasks of choosing tools, instrumenting them properly, interpreting their results, and iterating. This is the missing piece in automated reasoning after all. A NN that can approximate at great cost those tools is a parlor trick and while interesting not useful or practical. Even if they have some agent system here, it doesn’t make the achievement any less that a machine can zero shot do as well as top humans at incredibly difficult reasoning problems posed in natural language.

[SJC_Hacker]

> I actually think this “cheating” is fine. In fact it’s preferable.

The thing with IMO, is the solutions are already known by someone.

So suppose the model got the solutions beforehand, and fed them into the training model. Would that be an acceptable level of "cheating" in your view?

[fnordpiglet]

Surely you jest. The cheating would be the same cheating as any other situation - someone inside the IMO skipping the questions and answers to people outside then that being used to compete. Fine - but why? If this were discovered then it would be disastrous for everyone involved, and for what? A noteworthy HN link? The downside would be international scandal and careers destroyed. The upside is imperceptible.

Finally, even if you aligned the model with the answers its weight shift of such an enormous model would be inconsequential. You would need to prime the context or boost the weights. All this seems like absurd lengths to go to to cheat on this one thing rather than focusing your energies on actually improving model performance. The payout for OpenAI isn’t a gold medal in the IMO it’s having a model that can get a gold medal at IMO then selling it. But it has to actually be capable of doing what’s on the tin otherwise their customers will easily and rapidly discover this.

Sorry, I like tin foil as much as anyone else, but this doesn’t seem credibly likely given the incentive structure.

[Jensson]

Yet that level of cheating happens all the time because its very unlikely to be discovered. Sometimes its just done by people lower down to increase their own career, since they don't have as much to lose, but cheating does happen and its not that unlikely especially when salaries are this high.