I'm increasingly seeing people read something in a post that isn't there. GP said "Tao is mobilizing the community".
You can mobilize the community through guest posts that slowly nudge people towards accepting AI, so that they demand funding for AI for academics. Which he himself suggests:
You can also brute force the existence of a proof...
It is true that the biggest splashes have been from counterexamples and such, but I have seen many smaller examples of proving positive results in my own field.
Perhaps not superhuman yet but sufficient to completely upend the status quo. And I'm supposed to believe that this won't change in a year? or two?
Maybe, but what remains of the human professional mathematics will be unrecognizable (at least for those without tenure I guess). All of our credit assignment systems are breaking and access to computational/financial resources is becoming way more important. Math has been one of the most open academic fields but everyone is becoming afraid of sharing their ideas. Personally, my job has slowly been moving from open-ended brainstorming to prompting/digesting LLM output (or LLM output transmitted by grad students). And the students are so demoralized! Also, the academic funding structures which have supported math departments are looking less and less stable - I imagine many of them will shrink.
I have never seen an AI or a human produce a false proof without explicitly using weird meta programming tricks that are very suspicious. No "good faith" Lean proofs have every been shown faulty, to the best of my knowledge. While the risk is non-zero, many of the AI companies are also trying to find bugs in the Lean kernel, so it is becoming very well stress-tested.
You just have to trust the statement and the lean compiler, not the proof. The compiler certainly still has remaining bugs, but I have never seen a bug leading to a false proof in good faith, only via obscure meta programming tricks. The nice thing is that the multiple versions of the compiler are constantly being stress tested. Still, there is plenty of work that could be done to make the compiler more trustworthy / easier to verify.
This being 13M lines of entirely agent-generated code, we can't be certain it's written in good faith and doesn't actually exploit some weird metaprogramming trick. The agents' goal was to write a proof that Lean prints "correct" on, not to check that the proof of the FLT was valid (which they wouldn't be able to do anyway).
It's not impossible, but I also know of no instances of an AI being told to prove something in Lean and exploiting such tricks. Surely Anthropic also had some agents looking for issues with the generated proofs. Personally, I am also comfortable trusting Kevin Buzzard, who was leading the human team aiming to formalize FLT and discussed this a bit on his blog.
Finally, the good thing about Lean is that if anyone ever finds a new compiler bug (which, by the way, are being searched for extensively using AI), you can correct the bug and recompile any old proofs of which you are suspicious. Any tricks in a false proof must be exploiting a bug in the Lean compiler, so as we increase trust in the compiler over time we also increase trust in every previously compiled proof.
I agree it's not a 100% guarantee, but in this case the human proof is well-understood and written about by many experts, so I think Claude had plenty of material to work with. Even if the task was enormous, I don't think any of the individual steps are out of the scope of what we have seen from current AI tools.
Watermarking just alters the pseudorandom number generator. If "I like turtles" was previously the response to your prompt with probability 100%, it will still be so. This is why watermarking is only effective for long strings of text
It's like the sudden change of a language style and its verbosity didn't happen recently.
To random words you pick and provide a sufficient amount of text to vary with random number without losing its meaning you need a text with high entropy.
Nothing about watermarking would require padding the response length with pseudo-intelligible Claudese. Regular filler would work fine.
Also, it would probably provide higher entropy to write normal human-sounding English instead of reusing a repetitive grab bag of load-bearing phrases. This theory doesn't really make any sense.
I think the old reddit redirect extension gets around this somehow, that has worked for me lately (occasionally with some toggling of the extension). Although maybe it's best to just use less reddit tbh
But it's a good thing, actually because:
- when reddit is good it's way to addictive
- reddit has become nearly as bad as most other social media sites
So if they force me to use an account, I'll finally be able to kick the habit ;-)
There is a cookie that you can set to still get the old interface without login on www.reddit.com (but NOT on old.reddit.com) which some of the deshittify-redditi extensions have added. But I wouldn't expect that to stick around - it's just there for now to soften the outrage.
Make that 'since forever'. But there used to be a lot of insightful discussion inbetween the facebook-like parts. (Maybe it was the same on facebook, I wouldn't know because I never had a facebook account and you can't access the site without it.)
But I deleted my account (or at least randomized my password) somewhere in 2016 or so, so apparently 10 years ago I decided I wanted out. But I'm still reading it at least as much as HN. So fingers crossed they screw up badly enough this time :-D
You don't always need an extension to use old.reddit.com, it's an actual setting if you're logged in.
The real problem is that old.reddit.com and its ecosystem are all becoming worse and worse. Just off the top of my head, things like image galleries, message notifications, RemindMe bot, RES, /r/random, etc all have various problems and breakage.
I resigned as a mod after the API shitshow and am so glad I did. It’s a terrible site. I wind up there every month or two from friends or looking something up, it’s hard to see how much of a cesspool it is when you’re so invested in it and up close.
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