Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid — welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • rookEnglish
    15·
    24 hours ago

    Looks like there might be a bit of an openai vs anthropic dick waving competition over mathematical proofs. I haven’t had time to digest all of this yet because it is a bit hard for me to read, but there are a few interesting nuggets in there such as making it clear that the ai firms treat this as a marketing exercise (no surprises there). They’re also apparently trying to obscure the amount of human assistance involved (again, no surprises).

    Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true. Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used.

    The main statement is here: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

    Associated stuff linked from here: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198

    Do note that the author made heavy use of llm assistance for their work, and does consider it to be the future of developing mathematical proofs… this isn’t human vs ai.

    • scruiserEnglish
      5·
      6 hours ago

      The /r/singularity and orange site responses have been gross, lots of commenters willing to totally overlook the multiple different ways OpenAI has been utter scum in this debacle in order to celebrate another LLM “success”.

    • sc_griffithEnglish
      18·
      14 hours ago

      there are tons of issues here. almost impossible to convey how bad things are. in no particular order:

      1. this research breakthrough was a consequence of dumping tons of money into the ai companies. if the future of the field means being entangled with openai et al. and extreme expenses that is going to upend mathematics in a much bigger way than ability to prove new things will. this hasn’t been a focal point of discussion yet but it looks to be at the center of mathematics going forward imo.

      2. possibly for legal reasons, the statement stops short of accusing openai of stealing their in progress work. as in literally snaking their documents off the cloud and using them to try to undercut researchers. but it’s very clear that that is what the author believes happened

      3. openai straight up threatened the mathematician in question. in a colloquial sense they’re engaging in extortion. apparently this is so routine for them that they didn’t even stop to consider that they can’t threaten an academic’s career (or they assumed the mathematician would understand there will be no academic careers in the future)

      4. openai is straight up lying about their research methods. there are various ways that their announcements have had the potential to be misleading (for example when you see “we spent $2000 to compute these proofs” ask how much they spent on attempts that didn’t work). but what they’re saying may generally just not be true even in a literal sense

      • blakestaceyOPAEnglish
        10·
        10 hours ago

        OpenAI:

        While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.

        https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:i4bfh2tyxihe2ksplmtcoopk/post/3muznyls6vk2v

        lmao what the fuck do you mean it’s unlikely but you can’t rule it out. do you not know what you’re training your models on? are you guys unaware of what’s going on in your own operation? does openai research not have any knowledge of what data they train their models on?

    • lurkerEnglish
      8·
      12 hours ago

      They’re also apparently trying to obscure the amount of human assistance involved

      of course lol, gotta keep that agi ruse up

    • lagrangeinterpolatorEnglish
      10·
      16 hours ago

      Glad to see that OpenAI has not changed in their scummy ways. Despite all that has changed in the meantime, they have kept their time-honored tradition of passing off other people’s work as their own.

      One of OpenAI’s math announcements a month ago claimed that their results cost only $2000 worth of tokens, which frustrated me because they were likely sweeping away many inconvenient details and almost certainly misrepresenting their true costs. But people took this as a gotcha. This is the same bullshit as the water usage arguments. We are literally seeing city council members signing motherfucking NDAs about this, and you think that water usage numbers provided by the tech companies themselves are going to sway me?

      I am also questioning OpenAI’s strategy of strip-mining math for PR, since it seems like advances in math do not actually register that well in the public. From what I remember, the Hugging Face incident got a lot more press than any of the math results.

      • scruiserEnglish
        5·
        5 hours ago

        I am also questioning OpenAI’s strategy of strip-mining math for PR, since it seems like advances in math do not actually register that well in the public.

        They want to sell the claim that they’ve “achieved AGI”. For the general public they can sell on the vibe of “the computer talks back to you”, but for more sophisticated audiences, they need something firmer. Everyone with even a fraction of the ability to think for themselves has stopped trusting benchmarks, so OpenAI and Anthropic has been looking for things associated with intelligence they can claim success on. Math proofs have the property of being somewhat automatically checkable, having lots of ideas scattered throughout the literature to let their LLMs sift through, and being associated with intelligence.

        • blakestaceyOPAEnglish
          3·
          5 hours ago

          And the bonus advantage of an academic community of which a sizable fraction is willing to burn leaded gasoline to truck the child laborers into the sweatshop to paint asbestos with radium, if it’ll get them arXiv posts.

      • geriksonEnglish
        6·
        16 hours ago

        yeah I think the push for math results is because they know some of their big investors know enough about how hard/advanced math is and they want to impress them. Burning down an entire academic community is worth it for that

    • ArchiteuthisEnglish
      12·
      17 hours ago

      The progression from ‘the alleged novel parts were actually already in the training data’ to ‘we just stole them from some guy’s chatbot logs’ has been nothing if not organic.

      an insane amount of compute had been used.

      You don’t say.

      • jaschopEnglish
        4·
        12 hours ago

        @supersquirrel@lemmy.ca I suppose this is a score for you apropos our recent discussion on industrial espionage. Although I’ll note that the domain they tried to take over this time (dickwaving with math proofs) does also not have a business model, so they’re not really working themselves out of their financial death sentence.

        • supersquirrel@lemmy.caEnglish
          4·
          11 hours ago

          Also hard to feel like a point for me when that atrocious Meta settlement with the attorney generals that basically locks in profits via regulatory capture just came out…

          As someone from the US it feels like a nuclear missile pointed at the fediverse…

    • rookEnglish
      6·
      15 hours ago

      Deleting this for now as I don’t have time to rewrite it properly, but I’m sure someone else will do a better job of the plagiarism/training on private data stuff that I’ve missed.

      • sc_griffithEnglish
        8·
        17 hours ago

        As Talia Ringer has pointed out elsewhere, there major issues from the point of view of mathematicians is the rush to scoop another researcher’s work, which is a dick move, and pressure to drop a co-author who works for a competing AI firm.

        what? that is absolutely not true. ill try to address this on my lunch break but it is way more serious than that