>I think we're very close to the point where AI-driven breakthroughs outside of pure math and software start to really affect the world.
What are you basing this on? What specific breakthroughs have convinced you of this trajectory?
>I think we're very close to the point where AI-driven breakthroughs outside of pure math and software start to really affect the world.
What are you basing this on? What specific breakthroughs have convinced you of this trajectory?
The results we've been seeing internally on our physics and circuit design environments are expert-level and beyond-expert-level results from models that Astra completely outclasses across the board on our evaluation suite (Fable 5+/Opus 5/Grok 4.6 were all worthy of being called AGI in my opinion). That's hard tech that will translate to real product innovation.
But you don't need any kind of insider information to see how fast the world is changing. ChatGPT launched less than 4 years ago and the advances in robotics, unsolved maths, and software are all riding the steepest exponential improvement curve any of us have seen. Interesting times we live in.
I mean honestly, that's the problem. I'm actually not seeing the world changing. What specific advances in robotics, unsolved maths, and software have LLMs provided? What is the finished result that affects everyday life? In all categories, it's been hype with little actual real results. The robots are still doing the things they did before 2022. The maths are a handful of fairly insignificant proofs that have no significant applications. Software seems to be buggier than ever, but that aside, we certainly aren't seeing a lot of new innovative applications. We're using the same applications as ever. The same operating systems. They've all changed very little.
I'm not trying to be a pain here, but I keep seeing people saying "look at the massive change all around us" and back here in reality, there is none. Give me concrete, real world examples. Name software. Name products. Name the breakthroughs specifically. This should be easy.
There are several hundred thousand mathematicians producing hundreds of thousands of new results in math each year. Why can't most people name any human contributions to mathematics from the past decade? What is the finished result that affects everyday life? Do you consider all those human mathematicians to be useless?
Most of the biggest breakthroughs in mathematics, breakthroughs that win Fields Medals like sphere packing in dimensions 8 and 24, have no applications in everyday life. Probably the only new mathematics results that people notice affecting their daily lives are the ones that enabled AI.
Nevermind mathematicians. What about the millions of programmers? Are they all hype too because people pre-2023 were griping on hn that software is buggier than ever and people are still using the same operating systems as always? Why couldn't the 30 million human programmers make something better in the past decade?
You set your bar so high that all the world's human experts in math and programming combined would fail to meet it.
The top LLMs in 2024 were Sonnet 3.5 and GPT 4o. You couldn't have expected those much weaker models to be making breakthroughs in math. The models that are making breakthroughs haven't been around very long.
They asked for a specific example, you've still not provided one, please provide the example.
Why?
1. I didn't say LLMs have made any breakthroughs in math, not because they haven't, but because it's irrelevant to my point. The parent comment is using the same argument academic research opponents have long used against research. The vast majority of research fails to meet their bar. How would your daily life be different if we had no humanities papers published since 2023? Or math?
2. You can google this in 10 seconds and see a dozen results in math. This is not a good-faith demand.
Or you can google and find out that those breakthroughs were not as revolutionary as they are presented.
For the last 60 years, whenever AI achieves something revolutionary, some people immediately say "well that wasn't particulary revolutionary".
Every single time.
It's a tired argument, and we should strive for the intellectual humility to do better in this forum.
Maybe AI isn't that incredible, the more you use it, the more you realize it's a tool, like a VCR, maybe that's why?
What was sold as AI was basically a "computer person". Maybe that isn't the reality so when people are like, "here's the self coding machine" everyone is a bit disappointed because it's not C3PO?
We're not going to suddenly have new robots or operating systems. Those things take time. Just because there's massive change afoot, doesn't mean it's widely adopted or applied at lower-level products. ChatGPT is a product, and software, and a breakthrough. You can have a freeform conversation with your computer about anything, in human language, and ask it to do or make stuff and it will at least try, sometimes with surprising results. That wasn't possible until recently. The robots and products are coming, rest assured.
The number of bug fixes to important programs has skyrocketed. Look at what Google are saying about how many Chrome security bugs they've been fixing lately. Other big software firms have been doing the same thing - AI has been finding and fixing a ton of bugs. I know of one big program where thousands and thousands of security bugs are being found and fixed.
It may not feel like this to you because a lot of the dollars right now are going into security bugs which you can't perceive. But it's definitely happening.
At the company I own I've got AI employees autonomously triaging backlogs and fixing long tail bugs. The software is definitely getting better, although by definition long tail bugs aren't ones you are likely to encounter. The subjective "feel" of how robust the software is won't change quickly.
New tech is always applied in apparently boring ways because we are imagination constrained and people harvest the low hanging fruits first. Remember claims there was worldwide demand for only about four computers? When Gates said he wanted a computer on every desk and in every home people laughed at him. What would people do with all those computers, they asked. But he was right about where the world was heading.
Amazon’s chatbot processed a price adjustment the other day without forcing me to call or chat with a human agent.
Constructed human life is just more complicated than the AI capitalists would want you to believe. For example, even if an AI model can design a circuit-board, does that mean it's inherently useful? You need to source the wafers, cut them, package them, advertise them, etc. Given LLMs by their nature are confined to language and language-adjacent tasks, that is a very small percentage of the overall reasoning needed to make changes in the real world. In reality, LLMs are the intended way to extract maximal surplus-value from white-collar workers. We may see an increase in innovation as a result of that, but not because AI necessarily did it, in the same way that the power loom didn't create computers because its textiles clothed the computer scientists.
I talked to an LLM at burger king the other day until it couldn't figure out that I wanted to change the drink on my previous order.