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Comment by nearbuy

10 hours ago

There are several hundred thousand mathematicians producing hundreds of thousands of new results in math each year. Why can't most people name any human contributions to mathematics from the past decade? What is the finished result that affects everyday life? Do you consider all those human mathematicians to be useless?

Most of the biggest breakthroughs in mathematics, breakthroughs that win Fields Medals like sphere packing in dimensions 8 and 24, have no applications in everyday life. Probably the only new mathematics results that people notice affecting their daily lives are the ones that enabled AI.

Nevermind mathematicians. What about the millions of programmers? Are they all hype too because people pre-2023 were griping on hn that software is buggier than ever and people are still using the same operating systems as always? Why couldn't the 30 million human programmers make something better in the past decade?

You set your bar so high that all the world's human experts in math and programming combined would fail to meet it.

The top LLMs in 2024 were Sonnet 3.5 and GPT 4o. You couldn't have expected those much weaker models to be making breakthroughs in math. The models that are making breakthroughs haven't been around very long.

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nearbuy

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bamboozled  10 hours ago

They asked for a specific example, you've still not provided one, please provide the example.

  • nearbuy  9 hours ago

    Why?

    1. I didn't say LLMs have made any breakthroughs in math, not because they haven't, but because it's irrelevant to my point. The parent comment is using the same argument academic research opponents have long used against research. The vast majority of research fails to meet their bar. How would your daily life be different if we had no humanities papers published since 2023? Or math?

    2. You can google this in 10 seconds and see a dozen results in math. This is not a good-faith demand.