Guys, please use critical thinking. The haters don't hate by default, we hate because we're gaslit about this stuff every day and it's annoying. Extraordinary claims require proof, and they're not giving us information that would be essential to knowing if this is actually significant or not.
AI already have an impact, and yes this is PR hype because this is a product. Yet both can be true at the same time. We're not blindly eating what's OpenAI is serving us as gold truth, we're just admitting it's doing remarkable progress.
Remember October 2024 Pelicans [1] ? It's been only less than 2 years.
We don't know what will come in the next 2 years. But the progress doesn't seem to stop for now.
People are skeptical of the announcement because the room include several PHDs in math and physics. The prompts are not published so we can see how generic the starting prompt is.
Nobody is saying it doesn't have an impact. What we're saying is the near-religious fervor isn't warranted. AI boosters always speak in the future tense, which is extremely telling because we have right now is basically "ok" not earth shattering.
If you think it's "ok", then you're probably not using it the right way.
I've been analyzing thousands of x86 traces and the AI made sense of them at a scale no previous human or algorithm could do before - I've been reading assembly everyday for half of my life. I'm doing prototypes in minutes what would take hours or days before. AI is answering questions in such a precise way in so many domains, learning something has never been easier.
This is "just ok" for you ? What do you need exactly ? god omniscience ? come on, can't we just appreciate for what it is and be excited about the future ?
Gary doesn't argue it's hype though. He argues 2 things: other people are getting carried away with the result, and we don't know enough about how it was reached to know where it falls on the impressive scale.
He literally says it's an impressive feat in the second article.
best point in that first link: openai doesn't tell us if they only tried to solve these 10 and each was solved (amazing) or if they asked it to solve a million problems and it got these 10. Either is great, one is more so.
Gary Marcus has been moving the goalposts since day 1. The guy is a psychologist. Why would anyone care what a psychologist has to say about AI? He's likely made good money from constantly moving the goalposts and being a denier, due to the publicity he gets.
He's simply a good phone number to have for journalists under time pressure who need to add the contrarian voice to their upcoming story. He delivers it reliably, then never reflects on how he was wrong in the past, just blasts forward as if nothing happened and just makes the next bonkers claims to the journalists who are very thankful for the prompt delivery of how AI is a nothingburger, and fake and won't ever do XYZ that it then proceeds to do in N months.
I remember the time when he insisted that diffusion-based image generators trained on Internet scale data will never be able to make an image of a horse riding an astronaut. Today you can generate 4K video of that.
Mate, if you don't like Gary Marcus that's your call, but you're completely just lying when you talk about his qualifications. He is not "just" a psychologist, he's done a lot of AI research and even started AI companies that were acquired. This is absolutely a person with the credentials to speak on this subject, and honestly all his takes I've read have probably been TOO nice to AI companies.
Your comment seems entirely disconnected from the posts you linked. It's impossible to deny the results, it is not PR hype that in the past couple of weeks LLMs have resolved problems that have been open in mathematics for many years. Some of those problems had remained unresolved despite keen interest from many humans.
The only way that is PR hype is if you're invoking the insane conspiracy that frontier AI labs are just buying off results that would otherwise be career defining for a mathematician, just for marketing.
The posts you linked are urging caution regarding the exaggerated e/acc-esque lies peddled by people like Musk, not that the models haven't proven themselves as having genuine ability to contribute to research in some areas.
I use these strange machines all the time. They have gotten notably smarter. That’s my personal experience.
They still do things that I find incredibly annoying and “dumb”. And I still have to clean up messes they make quite often.
But on the whole they are clearly smarter than before. No extraordinary claims needed. I just try to learn how the tool works and how to use it effectively.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/two-critical-updates-re-as...
As always, PR hype. Goalposts have not moved.
Guys, please use critical thinking. The haters don't hate by default, we hate because we're gaslit about this stuff every day and it's annoying. Extraordinary claims require proof, and they're not giving us information that would be essential to knowing if this is actually significant or not.