Hi fellow haters. This video shows how LLMs are solving important math problems unsloved for a long time. I’m not a mathematician, but this flies against my biases of thinking LLMs are a marketing stunt and are overblown. Anybody competent in math or adjacent fields willing to jump in and clarify this progress? Cause, I’m having troubles making llm model solve a simple thing from time to time and here they are making progress with fucking Riemann hypothesis. This is hurting my ego, not gonna lie.
I’ve read a few of these “results.” Often goes like this:
“We fed our problem into the LLM and carefully analyzed the pages of results. It was largely bullshit that didn’t work, however it gave us an idea that we decided to pursue…”
I’m not actually seen any real stories about these systems solving anything in mathematics or computer science of value directly. Not like a human. For most of them it sounds more like inspiration. And, frankly, these models are decent(ish) regarding pulling information together that may be related. Statistical correlations are what they do.
And for us as researchers, that certainly can bring inspiration. I can’t possibly know every single word or idea in some of the areas I study. LLMs don’t either, but just pulling related things together can be helpful.
But, no, I’ve not seen results created directly by such a system that held water without his man intervention yet.
BTW, Your mental state should not be connected to the success of any computer tool. That’s all these are is a tool, with lots of flexibility but dubious utility. The biggest things that bother me about them are social, political, and financial.