[bgwalter]

The massive amounts of compute power is not the major issue. The major issue is unlimited amount of reference material.

If a human can look up similar previous problems just as the "AI" can, it is a huge advantage.

Syzygy tables in chess engines are a similar issue. They allow perfect play, and there is no reason why a computer gets them and a human does not (if you compare humans against chess engines). Humans have always worked with reference material for serious work.

[chpatrick]

Humans are allowed to look up and learn from as many previous problems as they want before the competition. The AI is also trained on many previous problems before the competition. What's the difference?

[bgwalter]

Deleted, because the "AI" geniuses and power users pointed out that Tao does not have a point. You can get this one to -4 as well, since that seems to be the primary pleasure for "AI" one armed bandit users.

[chpatrick]

It doesn't say anywhere that Gemini used any of those things at ICPC, or that it used more real-world time than the humans.

Also, who cares? It's a self contained non-human system that could solve an ICPC problem it hasn't seen before on its own, which hasn't been achieved before.

If there was a savant human contestant with photographic memory who could remember every previous ICPC problem verbatim and can think really fast you wouldn't say they're cheating, just that they're really smart. Same here.

If there was a man behind the curtain that was somehow making this not an AI achievement then you would have a point, but there isn't.

[raspasov]

I think "hasn't seen before" is a bit of an overstatement. Sure, the problem is new in the literal sense that it does exist verbatim elsewhere, but arguably, any competition problem is hardly novel: they are all some permutation of problems that exist and have been solved before: pathfinding, optimization, etc. I don't think anyone is pretending to break new scientific ground in 5 hours.

[chpatrick]

It's not new scientific ground but a machine beating a challenging computer science problem unassisted is a big deal. If they can do that then there are a lot of other challenging things they can do.

[raspasov]

Like what exactly? As far as I can tell, the drug discovery is fizzling out, so it's not talked about much. Toxicity, for one, is a big problem, and the AI is not going to tell you whether the new drug it just concocted is suitable for humans or not.

Small model solves an easy problem; big model solves a challenging problem. I wouldn't call those problems; they are more like invented puzzles. Perfect match for the AI marketing department to "solve".