Comment by harshitaneja

Comment by harshitaneja 2 days ago

8 replies

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The amount of goal post shifting is so amusing to see. Yes, sure this was probably not an "important" or a particularly "challenging" problem which had been open for a while. Sure, maybe it remained open because it didn't get enough eyeballs from the right people to care about spending time on it. Yes, there is too much overhyping and we are all tired of it somewhat. I still think if someone 10 years ago told me we would get "AI" to a stage where it can solve olympiad level problems and getting gold medals in IMO on top of doing so with input not in a very structured input but rather our complex, messy human natural language and being able to do so while interpreting, to various degrees of meaning what interpreting means, image and video data and doing so in almost real time I would have called you nuts and this thing in such a duration sci-fi. So some part of me feels crazy how quickly we have normalized to this new reality.

A reality where we are talking about if the problem solved by the automated model using formal verification was too easy.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying any of this means we get AGI or something or even if we continue to see improvements. We can still appreciate things. It doesn't need to be a binary. What a time to be alive!

magicalist 2 days ago

> The amount of goal post shifting is so amusing to see

Can you be specific about the goal posts being shifted? Like the specific comments you're referring to here. Maybe I'm just falling for the bait, but non specific claims like this seem designed just to annoy while having nothing specific to converse about.

I got to the end of your comment and counting all the claims you discounted, the only goal post I see left is that people aren't using a sufficiently excited tone while sifting fact from hype? A lot of us follow this work pretty closely and don't feel the need to start every post with "there is no need for excitement to abate, still exciting! but...".

> I am not saying any of this means we get AGI or something or even if we continue to see improvements. We can still appreciate things. It doesn't need to be a binary.

You'll note, however, that the hype guys happily include statements like "Vibe proving is here" in their posts with no nuance, all binary. Why not call them out?

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  • zug_zug 2 days ago

    Well there's a comment here saying "I won't consider it 'true' AI until it solves all millenium problems"... That goalpost seems to be defining AI as not only human level but as superhuman level (e.g. 1 in a million level intellect or harder)

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    • nitwit005 2 days ago

      That's the only such comment I found. The amount of goal pushing would seem to be 1.

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  • BigParm 2 days ago

    Maybe the Turing test for one. Maybe etc.

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    • mrguyorama 2 days ago

      Except nobody ever actually considered the "turing test" to be anything other than a curiosity in the early days of a certain branch of philosophy.

      If the turing test is a goal, then we passed it 60 years ago and AGI has been here since the LISP days. If the turing test is not a goal (which is the correct interpretation), nobody should care what a random nobody thinks about an LLM "passing" it.

      "LLMs pass the turing test so they are intelligent (or whatever)" is not a valid argument full stop, because "the turing test" was never a real thing ever meant to actually tell the difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, and was never formalized, and never evaluated for its ability to do so. The entire point of the turing test was to be part of a conversation about thinking machines in a world where that was an interesting proposition.

      The only people who ever took the turing test as a "goal" were the misinformed public. Again, that interpretation of the turing test has been passed by things like ELIZA and markov chain based IRC bots.

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Davidzheng 2 days ago

Yeah, I agree. As a mathematician it's easy to say that it's not a super hard proof. But then again, the first proofs found by running AI on a large bucket of open problems was always going to be some easy proofs on a not-very-worked-on problem. The fact that no one did it before them definitely shows real progress being made. When you're an expert, it's hard to lose track of the fact that things that you consider trivial vs very hard may be in fact a very small distance in the grand scheme of things (rel to entities of different oom strengths)

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Libidinalecon 2 days ago

I am rather pro-AI in general but I just can't imagine in 2015 what I would think if you told me that we would have AI that could solve an Erdos problem from natural language but it can't answer my work emails.

It actually doesn't help me at all at anything at my job and I really wish it could.

That isn't really goal post moving as much as a very strange shape to the goal post.

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