"Although if no one understands the frontier math (because no one is getting paid to), I'm not sure it even matters what the quality of the cpu math is?"

Presumably AI will be connect the dots to the applications. As the declaration says, this isn't just about math. Human understanding is losing economic value. You can understand stuff on your own time, I guess.

The standard justification for pure math to holders of purse-strings is something like "it might lead to a useful application down the road, like crypto, who knows". That looks pretty inefficient now. We have to entertain the possibility that AI can develop the math needed for any application we put to it. Eg if number theory didn't exist, we could have asked AI for a way to transit messages securely and it would maybe come up with fermats little theorem as part of its solution or maybe come up with an approach we can't conceive of right now seeing as most of us are constrained to available number theory. Like how in the last year when I give an LLM a programming project I see it doesnt even bother with of the many software libraries I and others have written and just codes up the calls it needs on the fly or finds some other ad hoc solution.

"I'd say advantage humans this time." Well LLMs were instrumental in any account of what happened. It's just a question of which company's LLMs did the breakthrough, and most of us outside silicon valley don't care about that part so much. The NYU guy himself said without LLMs the solution is maybe 10 years away.

Would this be unethical if it was a human who heard rumors about a solution then attacked the problem, solved it and published first? Often knowing of the mere existence of a solution carries a lot of information--you would know the problem is accessible, you would expect clues in recent progress (the two Spanish researchers in this case), you would probably have a sense if the solution is a counterexample or positive proof, and so on. I think there are similar examples where we think of them as maybe unsporting but not quite unethical. Does it change if it's openAI and not a human?

According to Buckmaster, the prompt used on the AIs was based on his approach and solution that was unpublished. So they were starting from 90% of the way there.

> Would this be unethical if it was a human who heard rumors about a solution then attacked the problem, solved it and published first?

Yes.

The problem with your counter-hypothetical is that not only is it unrealistic, it's utterly impossible. No human would be able to do in such a short timeframe what the LLM did. Part of what makes the OpenAI move so egregious is how bullying it was. It was the big guy coming along with their nearly infinite resources and squashing the little guy who's devoted a good chunk of his career to the problem.

Actually my hypothetical is completely realistic as I've been involved in such scenarios. It's unrealistic maybe for a millennium problem to come in on a rumor and still front-run but not at all for the many other problems we work on and which manifest our ethical code. If you're saying ethical rules change depending on the prize be clear about it, because I can see arguments that they change to favor either side.

That sounds like PR nonsense to me. These companies have had teams of mathematicians for at least 1.5 years looking to make headlines, and they didn't bother trying all 10 millennium problems? Yeah right.

As Ohentis says below, maybe the new thing was going all-in.

But my advice, in this weird new world we’re living in, is not to dismiss claims like this as PR fluff. Just about every time I’ve been incredulous of some ridiculous new AI advance and I think it’s BS, it turns out I’m the one that hasn’t caught up with the exponential rate of advancements.

I mean they might not have tried spending 30 million dollars with a new model yet.

yeah, there were some posts of his that always got top hit on certain google searches in the days before stackexchange. And this sounds like typical John D Cook. All these people claim to identify some "tells" and whenever a study is done people are horrible at distinguishing AI vs non-AI prose.

No, for example, people torrent vastly more mp3's than they could ever listen to

Yeah but then if you're trying to replicate Spotify functionality, then you'd need a lot of "dark" tracks so that you could listen to the ones you want to listen on a whim.

Being a tech, I had access to people's mp3 collection so my collection got huge but I never listened to them.

maybe, but openAI is exposed to a lot more legal liability here than whoever was exaggerating about moltbook.

Was there some sort of scandal about moltbook recently? What is the exaggeration?

Moltbook was completely fake. It was just set up to make it look like Moltbot (formerly ClawedBot, later renamed to OpenClaw) was sentient, to generate hype.

naive question--does " He did this at the key opening and middle-game sections and never burnt through the full buffer of handicap points in the last two games. " imply in retrospect he could have won with a smaller handicap? or was having the rest of that buffer in reserve guiding strategy?

Traditionally, handicaps are usually given in the form of extra stones played on the board. This is a coarser resolution than points, with one extra stone in the opening having a strategic value of about 13 points. So he probably couldn't have won if his handicap were a full stone smaller, but he may have won if it were a few points smaller.

I'm guessing their defn of AGI is something like the sum total of all humans' abilities? Still though some of those tasks (e.g. beat an index fund) may very well be impossible, and worse yet a lot of those tasks are not coherently defined.

It has been pretty weird to me, as an American, to hear how much less distinctive Australian/NZ accents have become over the last 40 yrs or so.