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Notes -
A Big Day in the Culture War
Apologies for any incoherency or grammatical errors; today's events led me to down more than my usual share of booze.
Earlier today, big things happened in math. No, not Claude providing a sub quadratic 3SUM. OpenAI released hundreds of notable math results, in a GitHub repo.
Fun results:
Hilbert's tenth problem over (\mathbb{Q}) is undecidable
The quasi-Riemann hypothesis
The rational Hodge conjecture holds for every CM abelian variety
Integer multiplication can be done in sub-log-linear time. Oh, there's also a sub-log linear DFT.
Thoughts and observations:
Mathematicians are big mad. View the relevant subreddit on our progenitor site. Most there are probably, at best, adjuncts at community colleges desperately coping with the downward trajectory of already marginal careers, but it's fair to say that the writing is on the wall for mathematicians. There's probably a double digit number of grad students staring into a glass of whiskey tonight and thinking of hanging themselves.
My immediate question was about whether this closer to the current peak of performance, or just a lazy demonstration of OpenAI's power. So, I took one of the particularly interesting preprints to me (memory and precision in Gaussian models) and tested whether it's at the edge of capabilities or not. 30 minutes of back and forth with Astra (itself behind OAI's internal model) resulted in a significantly stronger result, on multiple dimensions. While I finished my first bottle, I spent a fair amount of time convincing myself of the result; I was convinced the strengthened results were plausible. Write this off as AI psychosis if you want, but try it yourself; I'm genuinely curious for what you get. (The back and forth, here, was entirely me saying "you can do it!", "keep at it, I believe in you", and "you've got this, finish it!")
Probably the most important line in OAI's announcement post is "The average result used the equivalent compute of roughly three hours of ChatGPT Pro thinking." This isn't a case of OAI spending millions for a marketing bump. My bet is a kind of Pareto distribution: most took minutes, not hours, with a long tail around Riemann-level results pulling up the average significantly.
Notably, ML related results are nearly entirely absent from this batch of proofs; maybe a half dozen touch on it, distantly. Some problem indices are skipped in overview.md. Conspiratorially, my inclination was to think they filtered them out for competitive advantage. I can't find any evidence of that in the GitHub repo or any of the preprints (equally plausible: deduping), so maybe they judiciously decided not to point their mathematical ballista at ML. ML also doesn't have a meaningful bank of rigorous conjectures, so given the conjecture sources, maybe they're not yet digging into ML math. But color me skeptical.
Does math matter? Is it something to advance civilization and technology, or an artistic pasttime for humans to create logical beauty? Likely both, today, but this is an almost nuclear detonation against the latter.
I did. Most of the top comments do not have an angry tone. It's more like, a mix of resignation and excitement. With some mad mixed into it.
Anyway and more importantly, it might be time to start thinking harder about the key question of our time: is it over for humancels?
Not any time soon, I think, but I tell you this: social positions in which being human is an inherent part of the value proposition are starting to seem like much more appealing things to devote one's time to than STEMing it up.
I'm thinking positions like prostitute, politician, athlete, stage actor, bartender, socialite, rock star, cult leader, man who makes money by befriending rich people, or man who makes money for taking the fall when an organization gets in trouble.
If y'all got any other ideas, share 'em. Cause it's time to strategize. Unless you're rich already, in which case: all good. Unless Skynet scenario.
I hope the AI-boosted productivity gains soon outstrip the job losses and we get the utopian diseases-cured Star Trek scenario instead of the Great Depression or Skynet ones.
STEM is over, IMO; even more broadly, abstract thought will soon be economically valueless, including the humanities (which can have meaningful rigor to them!)
I would say that, to the extent labor income exists in the future, it's the physical aspect that matters. Prostitute, yes; OnlyFans star, no, you'll be competing with millions of AI bots who will outcompete you on every dimension.
Hoping I'll have enough to retire by the time that transition is complete.
I think it will take a while, particularly for large bureaucratic entities with entrenched market positions. Even in software engineering, a rather ridiculous amount of time is spent on coordination problems, figuring out what customers want, compliance and legal, flip-flopping management... If that overhead was previously say, 50%, even if LLMs can cut the dev time to zero, the maximum speedup is still only 2x. It's effectively an organizational version of Amdahl's law.
Organizational frictions are real. A year ago, I'd guess I spent 60% of my time writing code, the rest spent doing organizational bullshit. Now it's something like 95% organizational bullshit, and 5% prompting and reviewing LLM-generated code.
This seems temporary to me, though. Once everyone finishes shifting to LLM coding, organizations (mega corps or startups) that minimize the organizational aspects will outcompete those that don't.
The organisational "bullshit" is what maintains a causal connection between what the end user wants and what your code does. The big idea of the Torvalds/Raymond side of the open source movement is that when hackers work for themselves or each other they can cut 90% of it out. That gets you Linux. Cutting 100% of it out gets you GNU Hurd, so be careful.
That's a bit optimistic about the organizational stuff in a large org. E.g. make a Gantt chart for reporting to higher ups; convert your team's tickets into a new particular spreadsheet structure; write a design proposal for a system that's already done so it can be used for promo. They aren't entirely valueless because they give organizational legibility into otherwise opaque processes for decision makers, but they're not the pleasant part of software engineering.
Agreed. I will correct my comment to "The minority of the organisational bullshit that isn't pure waste is what maintains a causal connection between what the end user wants and what your code does."
Good software management (actually good management anywhere) is partly about protecting your team from the bits of organisational bullshit that don't align them - or protecting the whole organisation by keeping them out altogether if you are the founder. And it is hard because throwing the baby out with the bathwater produces a misaligned organisation.
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