Comment by svat

Great set of observations, and indeed it's worth remembering that the specific details of assistance and setup make a difference of several orders of magnitude. And ha, he edited the last post in the thread to add this comment:

> Related to this, I will not be commenting on any self-reported AI competition performance results for which the methodology was not disclosed in advance of the competition. (3/3)

(This wasn't there when I first read the thread yesterday 18 hours ago; it was edited in 15 hours ago i.e. 3 hours later.)

It's one of the things to admire about Terence Tao: he's always insightful even when he comments about stuff outside mathematics, while always having the mathematician's discipline of not drawing confident conclusions when data is missing.

I was reminded of this because of a recent thread where some HN commenter expected him to make predictions about the future (> “This is indeed a mystery,” I remarked. “What do you imagine that it means?”

> “I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

Edit: BTW, seeing some other commentary (here and elsewhere) about these posts is very disappointing — even when Tao explicitly says he's not commenting about any specific claim (like that of OpenAI), many people seem to be eager to interpret his comments as being about that claim: people's tendency for tribalism / taking “sides” is so great that they want to read this as Tao caring about the same things they care about, rather than him using the just-concluded IMO as an illustration for the point he's actually making (that results are sensitive to details). In fact his previous post (

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