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Interesting developments in use of AI in mathematics and writing
{Math}International Mathematical Olympiad is an international competion for high schoolers around the world. They compete in solving problems related to inequalities, number theory and geometry. It is the last category in which Google's AlphaGeometry leapfrogged the previous SOTA, reaching almost Chinese-team level of success.
It's method is intuitively attractive: it uses both unbiased but blind pattern finding skills associated with LLM today, and rigourous symbolic math honed by millenia of human efforts to find the greatest amount of pure truth. That the latter was included speaks to the fact that we are still at the centaur stage of AI, in that sometimes augmenting AI with what humans already know, allows it to perform better than not doing so.
In the future all AI will be unconstrained by human traditions and biases, thus it will be able to search a wider space, enabling it to beat humans at games humans invented. Such is already the case with AlphaGo. Euclidean geometry has more difficult rules, so some handholding is still needed.
{Writing}Akutagawa Prize is a literary prize expected to awarded twice each year. It is considered one of most prestigous such prizes in Japan. Previous winners include: 石原 慎太郎, 安部 公房, 遠藤 周作, and 大江 健三郎.
The latest winner, 九段 理江, won it for 東京都同情塔, a novel about a high-rise prison tower in futuristic Tokyo and its architect's intolerance of criminals, AI being a recurring theme. In the acceptance speech 九段さま admitted that 5% of the novel was copied verbatim from ChatGPT. Again centaur approach wins out against pure AI.
Had the author attempted to write the 144 pages by asking AI to do it instead, the result would be incoherent, as currently techology isn't there yet to hold in memory so great amounts of data. 九段さま judicious and moderate use of AI to augment, rather than replace, human writing seems to have served them well, beating out works written by only humans.
To be honest, the base LLM-style AI seems far more reliant on "what humans already know" than augmenting it with some math laws. The former seems like a move closer to a truly thinking AI rather than one that just predicts what an answer would be without any kind of logic behind it.
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And yet creative-class salaries and status is the greatest it's ever been. The very jobs AI is predicted to automate, are thriving. For example, the revenues and readership of the 20 or so Substack blogs I follow has only grown, even accelerated, since 2021. Blogs that only got 40 'likes' per article in 2021 now get easily in the hundreds. Substantial revenue growth, too. So either AI cannot replace this job, or there is a big arbitrage opportunity here. Same for fiction writing (e.g. AI imitation Stephen King ) . I think the former. This does not mean it cannot eventually happen, but predictions about technology have a tendency of being either wildly optimistic or pessimistic. Or , AI can do a good job fooling or pretending to be human or emulating human-like attributes, but cannot easily replace a job.
I don’t think Substack readership or even revenue is a good proxy for the general salaries and status of the arts. Maybe substack is just in its New Relationship Energy. Maybe this is what the kids call a “zero interest rate phenomenon.”
Shit, with the amount of hate a “creative-class” receives around here, you’d think authors were one paycheck away from getting run out of town on a rail.
A motivated doomer can go scrounge up, say, movie theater statistics. I wouldn’t take that seriously as an argument against the arts. The ceteris never is paribus.
It has been 3 years and no sign of slowing, coinciding with the huge surge of LLMs over the past 2 years. If that is a poor proxy, consider tech salaries, which are also on the up-and-up, layoffs notwithstanding (although these layoffs seemed to have more to do with over-hiring post-Covid than Ai). I think this shows that creative jobs are surprisingly resistant to automation. The laptop class is the butt of many jokes or a convenient whipping boy for perceived class stratification in an increasingly divided America , but is not going away either.
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For once in my life, I will contend that a particular example of AI reaching competence comparable to peak humans is not that big of a deal.
Here's Paul Christiano claiming this could happen, and soon, and quite easily, in the primordial times of 2022:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sWLLdG6DWJEy3CH7n/imo-challenge-bet-with-eliezer?commentId=jSnfYKAv3hxAPwWhH
So while I agree with the general thesis that AI is going to overtake humans, even our best, and quite soon (3-10 years for ASI is about my 95% CI, 50:50 by 2028, as in any an AGI that is better than the set of all humans at all cognitive tasks), this shouldn't make you update particularly hard in either direction.
The arrival of GPT-4 prompted me to dust off my urge, present for a while, to write a novel. Not because it is as good a writer as me (it isn't), but I could see the writing on the cards since the GPT-3 days, and right now I give maybe 30% odds that GPT-5 will write a better novel on any topic I would wish to, including emulating my voice, and according to the majority of readers, do a better job at it.
It does, however, write better than the average human on any topic, if only because of how incompetent the average human is. GPT-2 was semi-convincingly replicating entire subreddits, even if the outputs were hilariously incoherent, and I think most of the default subs like /r/aww or /r/WorldNews would be improved if every human redditor commenting was replaced by an instance of GPT-4 (hopefully one not prompted to act like the average user there, and even then it's only pretending to be retarded). Have you seen the average email or high school essay? For most people, outsourcing that to GPT-4 is an unqualified improvement.
But yes, the strong expectation that I will one day be obsolete as a writer was a driving force for me knocking out a couple while I'm still relevant. Maybe it'll give me street cred in the posthuman future, like Usain Bolt has today even though a car from the 1930s could leave him in the dust. I was good at my passions, before AI replaced everyone.
Yeah, Christiano is absolutely right here. There are some sorts of problems which have significant components that are comparatively much simpler for machines than humans, for example:
This is not to say that it's trivial to make a computer be superhuman at these problems. Despite there being aspects that are very machine-friendly, there's still a lot of difficult work to be done to actually get a machine do them. But it shouldn't make you update particularly much; this is not an "AI is now smarter than IMO medalists" moment.
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That is actually a problem: it gets harder to filter out spam and idiots. I actually got fooled few times already.
essays free from typos or other errors from students whose in-class work is full of mistakes or otherwise of poor quality, would give it away
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The goal of those is usually proof of work/attention given, not quality.
One thing I've learned from the internet is that American schools and universities seem to love making students do large amounts of largely pointless drudgework.
this is to filter for conscientiousness
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Are other school systems any better? My experience with South American schools and everything I have read about East Asian schools suggests that both are worse.
My school in India (a prestigious one, for what that's worth) did not give us nearly the amount of homework as was expected in Western school.
Homework is hardly a thing here. You're not graded on it, you have annual and quarterly assessments, and the teachers expect you to look over the teaching material and practice till you pass them.
What is substituted, for homework, is hours of private tuition after lessons, which is not imposed on the students by the teachers, not a filter for conscientiousness (almost anyone who is not bottom 25th percentile is chucked into one of those), and is nigh a necessity if you want to be competitive for the exams that actually matter, at the end of high school.
But homework, in the American sense? Largely irrelevant. You will be tested, in a standardized manner, on your mastery of the subject, at the end of primary education, and that will change the trajectory of your life.
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Because the goal of the American school system is to justify its absolutely ludicrous amount of funding, ideally in a way which doesn't require the people staffing it to do any actual work and definitely in a way which requires even more funding.
Massive amounts of pointless drudgework is easy to evaluate and declare a thing which is a result, an output that shows the education system doing something. That it doesn't help students learn and may actually be counterproductive is besides the point; the students learning is absolutely immaterial to the education system, and in fact the students learning too well may not be a good thing from its own perspective, because that makes it harder to make the obviously false claim that schools need more money.
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I wonder how long before AI makes substantial progress with string theory, which based on my limited understanding is based on geometry.
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