Comment by at1as
6 hours ago
I like Erdos problems as a benchmark. Models continue to solve them, but a pretty tepid rate now that the low hanging fruit has been taken.
From https://epoch.ai/latest/announcing-frontiermath-erdos
> Only GPT-6 Astra solved anything: 2 of the 68 problems. It disproved problem 74 by finding a counterexample, at a cost of $218 and 15 hours of working time, and it proved problem 126, at a cost of $247 and 16 hours
> Across all attempts, GPT-6 Astra solved 5 of the 68 problems at least once: the two above, plus problem 1, which it disproved, and problem 548 and problem 571, which it proved. Most of the remaining problems were attempted between two and five times in total (172 attempts), and none was solved. Reaching these five solutions took over $220,000 of compute across all attempts, compared with roughly $20,000 for the benchmark run itself.
Which implies a genuine improvement in capability, but there's a still a very long tail ahead that models will continue to need to improve to capture.
I don't:
"Problems solved before a model's training cutoff can be filtered out, and all models compared on the remaining problems" means that the problems an older model actually solved are the ones that get filtered out, while the remaining problems are the ones it already tried and failed on. So older models end up with 0s on the filtered set and you can't really use this to compare new models to older ones.
Also, since these are known public problems, you can't stop people from spending far more than your arbitrary time and $ limits on them. So the number of clean problems will go down over time.
A very long tail of problems that weren't solved by humans? Sure.
It's a sarcastic take and I understand that you are probably talking about "spiky intelligence", but you've chosen unsolved problems as a measure of the progress yourself.
What does this mean?
There are 1217 problems that Erdos proposed, 595 of which are open: https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems
Unlike traditional benchmarks, it's difficult to overfit your models to produce flattering results to unsolved problems. The open problems very likely do not have published solutions (the initial batches were merely models surfacing data that wasn't published in obvious places, but we're past that now). New models will exhibit something novel by adding solutions. And the matter of solution is interesting as well (contradiction versus a positive proof).
I would venture to predict it'll take years to decades to get to 0 open problems. But I'd be very happy to have this comment look foolish in retrospect as models continue to improve
I mean that it's hard to determine retroactively how much time it would have taken humanity to solve an open problem that was solved by AI. This is a measure that can make ASI look mundane because we don't know how long it would have taken mathematicians to solve a subset of the Erdős problems.
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