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by somenameforme 10 days ago
The two big discoveries both came from the negligible handful of mathematicians working at OpenAI/Anthropic in spite of many orders of magnitude more mathematicians using them outside of the companies. I don't see any way to explain this without assuming that the limiting factor is the ability to burn a few rainforests worth of tokens in pursuit of something publishable.

I think it would also explain their opacity towards the process. Being able to solve such well known problems in a nice replicable 1-2-3 way would be far more effective marketing than their complete opacity outside of the result, which suggests that they feel transparency is not in their best interest for some reason.
2 comments
saithound 10 days ago
> The two big discoveries both came from the negligible handful of mathematicians working at OpenAI/Anthropic in spite of many orders of magnitude more mathematicians using them outside of the companies

Well, mathematicians not working for Anthropic/OpenAI are heavily disincentivised from reporting that their discoveries were made using AI. If e.g. the idea that resolved the Mahler conjecture came from AI, it's not like we'd ever know.

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tptacek 10 days ago
Would you ordinarily be able to "explain this", if a mathematician had come up with this on their own? How would that story go?
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somenameforme 10 days ago
Bayesian probability. Were outcomes being driven by 'normal' usage of LLMs then it's extremely improbable that both big discoveries would come from the small number of people working at the companies. That suggests working at the companies is more the decisive factor than the LLMs in and of themselves.

And what do you get from working at the company? Likely a rather massive token/processing budget. The companies opacity towards the path to these discoveries also makes this further probable as 'spend millions of dollars in tokens' is a somewhat less attractive narrative than the implied narrative of 'just use Fable.'

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