[runarberg]

I am also an AI skeptic, but I would rather have used the 1000 monkeys with a 1000 typewriters will eventually write the whole works of Shakespeare analogy.

When you consider the amount of computation which went into this discovery it is less impressive. Like if you spend a lot of fuel you can travel really fast, much faster then a bicyclist. Similarly Go-engines can beat the best humans at go, but they spend several orders of magnitude more energy to do so.

Mathematicians prove or disprove conjectures all the time and use orders of less energy to do so. Using LLMs is kind of just throwing money at the problem and hoping it works. In this case it did. But this is not the most efficient way to do this, and it won‘t scale.

[xylenox]

> Go-engines can beat the best humans at go, but they spend several orders of magnitude more energy to do so.

From what I can find AlphaGo Zero runs at ~400 watts, while a human brain uses ~20. So really only about 1 order of magnitude difference.

Of course, training costs are a different question entirely.