Comment by amelius
7 hours ago
> The answer was simple in hindsight. It just kept looking until it found it—and that persistence might show up in many other areas.
Sounds more like brute forcing than intelligence, this time.
7 hours ago
> The answer was simple in hindsight. It just kept looking until it found it—and that persistence might show up in many other areas.
Sounds more like brute forcing than intelligence, this time.
I don't think it counts as brute forcing unless you're resorting to trying every possible solution. And clearly the LLM didn't do that here, because there would be near-infinite possible solutions.
I don't think we can really call "trying lots of different ideas for an extended period" "brute-forcing," unless we use that term for lots of humans who have struggled with hard math problems for years.
That seems a like the result for a lot of AI solves. It solves it due to persistence, on a problem that hasn’t been important enough for a human to invest significant time into.
That's what Terence Tao said in one of his recent videos about it. That what the LLMs can provide is scale that humans can't. The example he provided is checking many possible solutions in a short amount of time because they can review all the previous literature and, for example, rule out ones with errors. He was realistic and practical about it and said that the tools working this way can be very helpful for a human mathematician to use even if they're not "thinking". I find that to be a good balanced view that, unfortunately, seems to be rare these days. Even on this forum.
But breadth first search combined with a good pruning/exploration heuristic has always been one of the field's (AI) main tools, so this certainly is not new.
2 replies →
Do you have a link to that video?
1 reply →
>Sounds more like brute forcing than intelligence
Do you have a criterion that distinguishes between whatever you mean by those two respective terms?
Power (Watts).
This was a glorious and layered response. Thank you for making me chuckle.
Next thing you know, we'll have a WattsApp to help AIs connect and discuss.
[dead]
There is a reason even intelligent people go back to brute force for certain problems.
Please stop abusing the term 'brute-force'. This is not brute force. Rarely is there a non trivial problem you can sove in one master stroke.
When a human solves a difficult problem by trying many approaches, we call it "persistence".
Superintelligence ≈ Stupidity × Persistence