Capitalism already is a poor allocator of human effort, resources, and energy, why lock in on this specifically? There's entire professions that are essentially worthless to society that exist only to perpetuate the inherent contradictions of this system, why not focus more on all that wasted human effort? Or the fact that everyone has to do some arbitrary sellable labor in order to justify their existence, rather than something they might truly enjoy or might make the world better?
I think we should at least ask the latter, if it turned out it cost $100,000 to generate this solution, I would question the value of it. Erdős problems are usually pure math curiosities AFAIK. They often have no meaningful practical applications.
Also, it's one thing if the AI age means we all have to adopt to using AI as a tool, another thing entirely if it means the only people who can do useful research are the ones with huge budgets.
These are absolutely worth studying, but being what they are, nobody should be dumping massive amounts of money on them. I would not find it persuasive if researchers used LLMs to solve the Collatz conjecture or finally decode Etruscan. These are extremely valuable, but it is unlikely to be worth it for an LLM just grinding tokens like crazy to do it.
No meaningful, practical applications? You realize that sounds incredibly naive in the history of mathematics, right? People thought this way about number theory in general, and many other things that turned out to have quite important practical applications. Your statement is also a bit odd in that researchers are already paid throughout their whole careers to solve such problems. I don't know.
> You realize that sounds incredibly naive in the history of mathematics, right?
This is after the fact justification. You are arguing that because a thing (number theory) showed practical applications we should have dumped a lot more effort into it. There is no basis for this argument whatsoever; it also seems to involve inventing a time machine. Number theory had no practical applications until the development of public-key cryptography, but you cannot make funding decisions based on the future since it’s unknowable.
Once we get something working, sure, you can justify more aggressive investment. This is not to say that we should not invest in pie-in-the-sky ideas. We absolutely should and need to. Moonshot research or even somewhat esoteric research is vital, but the current investment in AI is so far out of the ballpark of rational. There’s an energy of a fait accompli here, except it’s still very plausible this is all unsustainable and the market implodes instead.
Because it could be a massive waste of time and money.
Why do you think it's a waste of time and money? I really can't see it.
Capitalism already is a poor allocator of human effort, resources, and energy, why lock in on this specifically? There's entire professions that are essentially worthless to society that exist only to perpetuate the inherent contradictions of this system, why not focus more on all that wasted human effort? Or the fact that everyone has to do some arbitrary sellable labor in order to justify their existence, rather than something they might truly enjoy or might make the world better?
> Capitalism already is a poor allocator of human effort, resources, and energy, why lock in on this specifically?
It's absolutely best allocator of human effort there is. It has some problems but compared to alternatives it's almost perfect.
3 replies →
I think we should at least ask the latter, if it turned out it cost $100,000 to generate this solution, I would question the value of it. Erdős problems are usually pure math curiosities AFAIK. They often have no meaningful practical applications.
Also, it's one thing if the AI age means we all have to adopt to using AI as a tool, another thing entirely if it means the only people who can do useful research are the ones with huge budgets.
Your logic undoes your point, because the kid who "solved" this technically didn't even have to invest in a degree.
2 replies →
Neither does the Collatz conjecture, Fermat's last theorem, ....
(Of course, those problems are on another plane than this one.)
But that’s exactly my point.
These are absolutely worth studying, but being what they are, nobody should be dumping massive amounts of money on them. I would not find it persuasive if researchers used LLMs to solve the Collatz conjecture or finally decode Etruscan. These are extremely valuable, but it is unlikely to be worth it for an LLM just grinding tokens like crazy to do it.
4 replies →
I would question at $60k. At $100k is a steal.
No meaningful, practical applications? You realize that sounds incredibly naive in the history of mathematics, right? People thought this way about number theory in general, and many other things that turned out to have quite important practical applications. Your statement is also a bit odd in that researchers are already paid throughout their whole careers to solve such problems. I don't know.
> You realize that sounds incredibly naive in the history of mathematics, right?
This is after the fact justification. You are arguing that because a thing (number theory) showed practical applications we should have dumped a lot more effort into it. There is no basis for this argument whatsoever; it also seems to involve inventing a time machine. Number theory had no practical applications until the development of public-key cryptography, but you cannot make funding decisions based on the future since it’s unknowable.
Once we get something working, sure, you can justify more aggressive investment. This is not to say that we should not invest in pie-in-the-sky ideas. We absolutely should and need to. Moonshot research or even somewhat esoteric research is vital, but the current investment in AI is so far out of the ballpark of rational. There’s an energy of a fait accompli here, except it’s still very plausible this is all unsustainable and the market implodes instead.
1 reply →