In late 2023, a Reddit user known as "evilscientist311" conducted a comprehensive analysis of Cleo's activity patterns and interactions with other Stack Exchange accounts.
Well, it does make the solutions less impressive, right? Because it's much easier to compute the inverse of an integral than an integral. What's impressive here is more in composing problems that have nice answers and can't be solved by computer algebra systems, then the sock puppet trick to conceal that you ha the answer all along.
Reshetnikov didn't confess to them being reverse engineered, though. He confessed to them being conjecture arrived at after working on the problem for a bit by tweaking similar integrals in symbolic math software / numerical approximations. Every post was a gamble because it could have been wrong.
Of course, that could be a lie, but he came clean about other things that make sense retrospectively.
I think there are some interesting parallels between what the Cleo account did, and what the large AI companies are doing now with some of the proofs for previously unsolved theorems.
There may be some value in the answers, but for some the value is in the understanding of how to get from the problem to the solution.
I wouldn't call myself a mathematician, but I encountered a few problems in my CS classes where I could work through the proof by hand, see that an algorithm works, and even mathematically prove it, but yet still didn't feel like I understood why it worked, or how the algorithm was invented/derived. But for many, the fact that it did work was enough.
Joe McCann and his audience discovered that Cleo was a ploy at ragebaiting the math forum in order to drive engagement for more useful proofs. A real-world Cunningham's Law social experiment.
So maybe OpenAI's ridiculous approach to mathematics has value in how it's ragebaiting us to scrutinize and/or come up with better proofs!
> for some the value is in the understanding of how to get from the problem to the solution
All of the value is in this understanding.
So many people are still in denial about it, but "AI" really is just a natural language search engine. AI helps organize what has already been written by humans and was technically self-evident from our work.
If we allow ourselves to continue down this anti-intellectual path and stop caring about why proofs work, we've basically entered another dark age.
I'm not saying AI can't possibly help at all with building intuition, but clearly there are a lot of idiots in the class who just gotta raise their hand first to blurt out whatever trash they come up with on impulse. Those people need to be told to sit the fuck down already. Their uncontrolled ADHD is ruining everything. There's nothing intelligent about mindlessly rushing to compute an answer. That is literally what the last few years have felt like for everyone else.
> AI helps organize what has already been written by humans and was technically self-evident from our work.
I am not 100% sure about the "self-evident" part here.
To your point: yes, AI doesn't come up with new axioms. But then we enter the topic of "math is invented or discovered?". Each of the discoveries are logical consequences of the axioms, but that doesn't mean they were "self-evident", especially for humans.
If everything was already self-evident, AI would just be a useless tautological machine. However, I think it is more than just that
In late 2023, a Reddit user known as "evilscientist311" conducted a comprehensive analysis of Cleo's activity patterns and interactions with other Stack Exchange accounts.
However, I and others were on the scent at least as far back as April, 2023. See for example: https://x.com/TheDavidSJ/status/1650957407902658571
Doesn’t necessarily make the solutions less impressive, but it’s kind of a relevant detail that is left out in the Wikipedia summary.
Of course, that could be a lie, but he came clean about other things that make sense retrospectively.
There may be some value in the answers, but for some the value is in the understanding of how to get from the problem to the solution.
I wouldn't call myself a mathematician, but I encountered a few problems in my CS classes where I could work through the proof by hand, see that an algorithm works, and even mathematically prove it, but yet still didn't feel like I understood why it worked, or how the algorithm was invented/derived. But for many, the fact that it did work was enough.
So maybe OpenAI's ridiculous approach to mathematics has value in how it's ragebaiting us to scrutinize and/or come up with better proofs!
All of the value is in this understanding.
So many people are still in denial about it, but "AI" really is just a natural language search engine. AI helps organize what has already been written by humans and was technically self-evident from our work.
If we allow ourselves to continue down this anti-intellectual path and stop caring about why proofs work, we've basically entered another dark age.
I'm not saying AI can't possibly help at all with building intuition, but clearly there are a lot of idiots in the class who just gotta raise their hand first to blurt out whatever trash they come up with on impulse. Those people need to be told to sit the fuck down already. Their uncontrolled ADHD is ruining everything. There's nothing intelligent about mindlessly rushing to compute an answer. That is literally what the last few years have felt like for everyone else.
I am not 100% sure about the "self-evident" part here.
To your point: yes, AI doesn't come up with new axioms. But then we enter the topic of "math is invented or discovered?". Each of the discoveries are logical consequences of the axioms, but that doesn't mean they were "self-evident", especially for humans.
If everything was already self-evident, AI would just be a useless tautological machine. However, I think it is more than just that