Comment by 0x1ceb00da
2 months ago
> some rando mathematician (Levent Alpöge) working for Anthropic, not Anthropic the organization
Why do you trust a random stranger so much? Will you hand over your car keys to a random stranger? Sharing the chat will take 30s of their time.
> There's no reason to think that it won't provided if asked for
But they didn't provide it.
OK, so the two options are:
A) Claude really produced this counterexample
B) A mathematician working for Anthropic solved a problem mathematicians have been working on for more than a century, and then credited it to Claude for PR purposes
If you believe B is more likely, why would you then believe a proof in the form of a chat log, when said chat log could itself have been faked by Anthropic way more easily than solving the mathematical problem in the first place?
The concern is that there could have been expert knowledge input, whose importance/worth we are unable to evaluate.
I don’t believe a mathematician produced the counter example secretly, but how much did they contribute to the result?
AI isn’t magic, so to evaluate the value delta, you need to know the value of the input.
While I agree that we need the inputs to properly evaluate what this means for LLM capabilities, I don't really believe that the amount of knowledge input matters much for the overall significance of the result.
These kinds of results are interesting for LLMs because mathematicians have been working on them for decades. If the result doesn't already exist, there's no way it's in the training data, and if mathematicians have been unsuccessfully tackling the problem for decades, it is believable that the use of a new tool made the result possible, even if guided by a great mathematician.
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Weirder has happened: https://mathsci.fandom.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem
If I came up with this counterexample, I sure as hell wouldn't give credit to Claude.
Indeed, the incentive is the opposite: hiding the fact that they used an AI would boost their own personal brand.
He worked for Anthropic, so such a claim would be very unconvincing
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> Why do you trust a random stranger so much?
Why do you make false claims and attack strawmen so much?
> But they didn't provide it.
because they are using the same prompt to try finding other counter-examples. they are milking it