Fair points, but the reason everyone is amazed is that five years ago this was entirely impossible for computers irrespective of the competition format or rules.
It’s as-if we had learned whale song, and then within two years a whale had won a Nobel prize for their research in high pressure aquatic environments. You’d similarly get naysayers debating the finer points of what special advantage whales may have in that particular field, neglecting the stunned shock of the general population — “Whales are publishing research papers now!? Award winning papers at that!?”
And it’s very impressive that whales can write papers.
A computer system that can perform these tasks that were unthinkably complex a few years ago is quite impressive. That is a big win, and it can be celebrated. They don’t need to be celebrated as a “gold medalist” if they didn’t perform according to the same criteria as a gold-medalist.
It's a good point - IMO is about performance under some specific resource constraints, and those constraints don't make sense for AIs. But I wonder how far we are from an AI solving a well-studied unsolved math problem. That would be more of a decisive "quantum supremacy" type milestone.
> there will be a proposal at some point to actually have an AI math Olympiad where at the same time as the human contestants get the actual Olympiad problems, AI’s will also be given the same problems, the same time period and the outputs will have to be graded by the same judges, which means that it’ll have be written in natural language rather than formal language.[1]
Last month, Tao himself said that we can compare humans and AIs at IMO. He even said such AI didn't exist yet and AIs won't beat IMO in 2025. And now that AIs can compete with humans at IMO under the same conditions that Tao mentioned, suddenly it becomes an apples-to-oranges comparison?
Actual post instead of ad-decorated screnshot: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/114881418225852441 (thread continued in https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/114881419368778558 and https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/114881420636881657).
Fair points, but the reason everyone is amazed is that five years ago this was entirely impossible for computers irrespective of the competition format or rules.
It’s as-if we had learned whale song, and then within two years a whale had won a Nobel prize for their research in high pressure aquatic environments. You’d similarly get naysayers debating the finer points of what special advantage whales may have in that particular field, neglecting the stunned shock of the general population — “Whales are publishing research papers now!? Award winning papers at that!?”
And it’s very impressive that whales can write papers.
A computer system that can perform these tasks that were unthinkably complex a few years ago is quite impressive. That is a big win, and it can be celebrated. They don’t need to be celebrated as a “gold medalist” if they didn’t perform according to the same criteria as a gold-medalist.
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It's a good point - IMO is about performance under some specific resource constraints, and those constraints don't make sense for AIs. But I wonder how far we are from an AI solving a well-studied unsolved math problem. That would be more of a decisive "quantum supremacy" type milestone.
> there will be a proposal at some point to actually have an AI math Olympiad where at the same time as the human contestants get the actual Olympiad problems, AI’s will also be given the same problems, the same time period and the outputs will have to be graded by the same judges, which means that it’ll have be written in natural language rather than formal language.[1]
Last month, Tao himself said that we can compare humans and AIs at IMO. He even said such AI didn't exist yet and AIs won't beat IMO in 2025. And now that AIs can compete with humans at IMO under the same conditions that Tao mentioned, suddenly it becomes an apples-to-oranges comparison?
[1] https://lexfridman.com/terence-tao-transcript/
To be clear, AIs didn't beat IMO, or the best human competitors at IMO, on these terms.
He is basically asking OpenAI to publish their methodology so we can understand the real state of AI in solving math problems.