[libraryofbabel]

This HN thread depressed me. I’m still thinking about why.

Look past the press-releasey gushing from OpenAI and there are all sorts of interesting and subtle questions here about the role for LLMs in mathematical research. I urge folks to click through to the accompanying comments from mathematicians published alongside the result. There is a really interesting discussion going on. I particularly recommend Tim Gowers’ remarks. This is really interesting stuff!

Yet the comments are just a battleground of people rehearsing the same tired arguments about LLMs from 2023, refutations of those arguments, angry counters, etc.

Does it make anyone else sad that the battle lines seem to have been drawn 3 years ago and we just seem to have the same fights over and over?

I wonder if we’ll still be doing this two years hence.

[getnormality]

Yes, this and every internet forum will still be doing this two years hence. Your life will be better if you take to heart this famous passage from Nietzsche:

I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation.

[libraryofbabel]

> Looking away shall be my only negation.

I’ve been thinking of building myself my own frontend to HN that makes it impossible to view comments, for this reason. Yet sometimes there are still really interesting discussions and it’s hard to let go of what for me feels like the last social media I want to be part of.

[jorisw]

An added stylesheet should be enough to do that

[jryan49]

People are afraid for their livelihood. What do you expect?

[libraryofbabel]

Well yes, but there is a choice being made here and I would love to believe we can do better. The rational response to being afraid about your livelihood isn’t to spend time filling every HN thread on LLMs with embittered negativity. Not to mention all the flat denials that LLMs can do mathematics and write decent code, which is almost a self-contradictory position if you are worried they are going to replace you.

There are a lot of big issues at stake here and just because a person is interested in what AI can do and curious to discuss it does not make them uncritically positive about it’s effects on society, the economy, and the world. Yet that is often the assumption and it leads to battle lines being drawn, on every AI discussion, over and over again. It means the serious discussion gets swamped and that makes me sad.

[conception]

Livelihoods and lives.

[JacobAsmuth]

Exactly. And when one's life is threatened, what are we to do if not fight?

Fight! Fight! Fight!

[doginasuit]

I find it understandable, it is common to evaluate human intelligence vs AI as a zero-sum competition, because that is how employers typically understand it and LM providers market it. AI proving itself moves the needle in an uncomfortable direction for all of us without very robust job security.

> I wonder if we’ll still be doing this two years hence.

It is going to take some time for people to recognize that AI has a very different set of competencies that compliments human intelligence rather well. It is unlikely to eclipse human intelligence at scale, and the companies betting on that will fall behind. That is when the conversation will start to shift.

[bdamm]

It isn't necessarily the case.

Another wishful/hopeful thought is that the human experience itself is valuable, that competing for resources and living within a social network and having physical needs somehow creates value that is essential for companies to operate.

But is it really the case? I don't think we know that, and I don't know if the economy that results when all the white collar and much of the blue collar workers no longer understand how to participate in whatever the economy is becoming. Because it is starting to look like old money is coming around, and soon we will all be serfs to the creature comforts of those who have money now, upward mobility will be a thing of the past, and a small ruling elite over the vast subservient majority will form, reorganizing societies to more resemble middle ages lordship rather than what emerged in the 50's and 60's following WWII.

[doginasuit]

We haven't seen a significant increase in the quality of LMM output since 2023 that hasn't been the result of throwing even more energy and compute at it. AI "reasoning" is just recursive iteration on their output, with diminishing improvement on each pass. It seems to be the reason why Mythos is not generally available, maybe a canary of sorts.

If LLMs were improving significantly independent of scaling up compute resources, I would be a lot more worried. The economic instability (on several levels) of the current trajectory cannot last. Countries and companies that don't take a more sustainable approach will eventually find themselves outclassed by those that do. Unfortunately that is not a guarantee against some sort of dark age in the short term.

[libraryofbabel]

> We haven't seen a significant increase in the quality of LMM output since 2023 that hasn't been the result of throwing even more energy and compute at it.

This is completely false. Most of the dramatic improvements in LLM quality in the last two years were due to the application of new post-training methods, especially RLVR. It’s really interesting to read about (you should!) and it is the whole secret to why LLMs did not plateau in 2024 or 2025 like many people confidently predicted. Sure, RLVR requires compute to do, but this is not just throwing more compute at 2023 LLMs.

[doginasuit]

That's interesting. If you have a source that shows that RLVR was primarily responsible for model improvement, I'd be interested to see it. In any case, it sounds like it has its own set of limitations and there are applications where it does not help at all.

[dogwalker5000]

> because that is how employers typically understand it and LM providers market it.

Every few months you get an article of some executive bragging that he fire an entire department of people because of AI.

It was adversarial from the start. The idle rich who don’t have to work for a living and their sycophants who somehow believe they won’t be replaced vs … everyone else.

I used to think that the common tale of AI rebelling in Hollywood movies was unlikely. Turns out we don’t even need rogue AI, our fellow men are quite willing to wipe the rest of us out.

[class3shock]

It seems like the outcome options are:

1. AI is developed to be smart enough to actual replace people, destroying the labor force and immensely concentrating power.

This seems like bs hyperbole but I am not an expert.

2. AI turns out to be a bubble of false promises and hype, bursts, and takes the stock market and economy with it.

I thought this was the most likely but I keep not hearing popping, so maybe the it's:

3. AI continues to be a tool that can substantially increase productivity in some areas and cause huge societal changes in others. The AI companies keep the hype train going or maybe it tapers off over time until talk meets reality but "real" AI never shows up and the bubble never pops because it's not one. Eventually there is 0-3 new FAANG companies with untouchable control of a tech we increasingly have to use to stay relevant.

Even if we avoid option 1 and 2, 3 doesn't exactly bode well either.

[godelski]

I think part of it is that one side throws rocks and so it never even matters was is in the article. It becomes a battle if the article is good or the article is shit.

Yes, I'm tired too. I want you have real discussions about these things. But the problem is everyone believes their reality is real and anyone's reality that disagrees is fake. It just escalates. I take long breaks from HN because I realize I just come to the forums and end up being angry. Why do we do this to ourselves? The reality is that at a core level we usually want the same things.

[tinfoilhatter]

IMO it's because people have fragile egos / worldviews they don't want shaken. Pretty much any opinion I type on this website gets instantly downvoted, unless it reaffirms the popular / mainstream narrative, because I happen to see the world differently than most.

This website is quite awful, and I also don't know why I spend any time on it. It's definitely not a website intended for meaningful discourse. It's a website where you can reaffirm whatever opinion is already established, and if your opinion is at all controversial or even just out of the box, you'll be punished for it.

[RedCinnabar]

What I don’t understand is why people dismiss this kind of progress with false claims. Especially when discussing programming, people start to act irrational using arguments from back in 2022.

I think that you can easily address your concerns about this new technology (since we all are concerned about the future) but at the same time acknowledge how revolutionary it is.

[scosman]

We won’t be doing it in 2 years. By then my side will have won!

[ex-aws-dude]

Lets just be real its because a lot of programmer's ego is built on intelligence/being a coding wizard and this threatens that ego

If suddenly anyone can code we're not that special anymore.