It's like saying:
- winners in the 30s were the last time we have pure human to win (before computer)
- winners in the 70s were the last time we have pure human to win (before internet)
- winners in the 90s were the last time we have pure human to win (before search engine)
Why can't we treat LLMs as just another tool like computers, search engines, computing libraries? Why do people keep trying to anthropomorphizing these binaries?
People in the 1800s used to win awards and acclamation by simply hand-cranking numbers for popular calculations (Pi, error functions, etc.) and printing them in a book. This will just be the same thing.
But it's not the same thing. I went through this conversation between Terry Tao and ChatGPT about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample [0] and it looks a lot more like a conversation between peers than him using a tool.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010345
"Looks like" being the operative keyword there. Do you feel like you're having a conversation with a peer when you prompt an LLM in the topic you're an expert of? For the love of God, I'd hope not. The whole point is that, even though these things are really good at generating what looks like human output, they are still just regular software algorithms.
> Do you feel like you're having a conversation with a peer when you prompt an LLM in the topic you're an expert of? For the love of God, I'd hope not.
Yes, I do feel that. Make of it what you will.
If you say "find some unsolved graph theory problem and counterexample for it" and LLM actually does it, is it really you that solved the problem? That's the difference vs other tools.
Is this a purely hypothetical question?
Or are you saying that’s what happened in this case. Because that’s not the way I understand it.
https://x.com/Qiaoqiao2001/status/2080003441821163958
While there was a bunch of human effort - it is not that hard to imagine this whole pipeline becoming fully autonomous in the coming months.