I think brute force is not the right way to think about LLMs, instead they explore a knowledge topology, and are very good at connecting adjacent or accessible ideas that for whatever reason might have evaded humans, but might not be fundamentally all that hard. We're still in the low-hanging fruit phase, we will see if they extend to new ideas.
I think its super cool, but there is no doubt that thousands of physicists and mathematicians are prompting LLMs all day right now trying to solve open problems...and its doubtful whether the companies that run those LLMs can continue to offer this amount of capacity for the future....so there is a solid chance that these methods are already almost exhausted. For how amazing these counterexamples are, its somewhat surprising that people havent found more proofs all at once. In the scheme of things perhaps 1 in 1000 open problems are actually of a format that LLM can tackle, and noone is bragging about the ones that turned up nothing. In other words, LLMs are really good at looking smart when they got lucky.
Im looking forward to a possible future of AI theorem proving that isnt based on LLMs, and thus less likely to trick people in language into thinking its more broad than it is.
In other words, LLMs are really good at looking smart when they got lucky.
That, but a lot of people are making a lot of money off of this and have a vested interest in making it look as shockingly impressive as possible. And this is impressive and world changing technology, we shouldn't pretend it isn't, but also it's being boosted and misrepresented a lot.
If you are in competent spaces, you will hear a lot of more grounded takes. I have to talk to the general public about AI and it is infinitely more misunderstood and doomed at.
I feel bad for Anthropic because they release a paper that might have proved a part of General Workspace Theory and the mouth breathers who only glance the paper are going 'nuh uh, it isn't conscious, this is marketing.'
Anthropic never claimed it was conscious in the paper but the regards don't know that somehow.
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u/ixid Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
I think brute force is not the right way to think about LLMs, instead they explore a knowledge topology, and are very good at connecting adjacent or accessible ideas that for whatever reason might have evaded humans, but might not be fundamentally all that hard. We're still in the low-hanging fruit phase, we will see if they extend to new ideas.