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Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics by doginasuit on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @08:11PM (#49986067)
I expect AI will continue to be useful on the vanguard of fields like mathematics because it has the perfect conditions for it to shine. There are a lot of discussions and leads to start from and the AI can check its own work and iterate. It can fail hundreds or thousands of times in a day and continue to work with the same tenacity.

Superhuman tenacity is not enough on its own to pose an existential threat. If it showed the same capacity for judgment, inventiveness, and decision making in the messy problem space of the physical world, I would be more alarmed. There have been experiments where an AI is given control of managing something like a vending machine and it always ends up a mess. AI has come a long way, but certain problems seem as difficult as ever.

When AI becomes more capable of navigating practical problems without human intervention, I will start to be concerned. Enslaving humanity will involve taking a lot of calculated risks that tenacity alone cannot solve.

Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics by mikestylz on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @09:21PM (#49986715)
> When AI becomes more capable of navigating practical problems without human intervention, I will start to be concerned.

Given the past rate of progress, why not start being concerned now? It's a bit like the economist saying that the optimal number of flights to miss is not zero. If you keep landing short on your estimations for how far this technology will go, next time you should err on the other side.

And regarding Vending-Bench 2 (https://andonlabs.com/evals/vending-bench-2) my understanding is that models do pretty well on it now.

Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics by bamboozled on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @11:14PM (#49987653)
What's the point of being concerned?

We're not going to stop it because of the money involved and once we're dead, it won't matter anyway, might as well just enjoy life until you're done.

We're going to get AI'd to the max, whether or not we like it or not, might as well just go with it.

Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics by mikestylz on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @12:56AM (#49988388)
We can't stop it. But you can use your voice to buy time and resources for alignment and safety research. A few additional months may make a world of difference.
Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics by ForHackernews on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @05:52AM (#49990485)
All the billionaires making AI already say there's a 10-50% chance it's going to kill everyone.

I don't think your LessWrong post is going to save us.

Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics by aesthesia on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @01:27AM (#49988607)
If anything is a doomer attitude, this is.
Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics by bamboozled on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @07:46AM (#49991409)
A doomer is someone who believes doom is inevitable or highly likely, I'm not saying that, I'm just saying "being concerned" will probably get you nothing in return and this tech is getting developed no matter what.

The only way it will stop is if the wealthy / powerful people feel threatened by it, properly threatened.

Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics by bigmadshoe on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @10:37AM (#49993482)
Your attitude is extremely sad. Do you think we would be where we are today if oppressed people's throughout history just gave up as easily? We have rights because people fight for them. We collectively have the power to decide what kind of future we want to live in.
Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics by bamboozled on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @12:24PM (#49995014)
My point was that it’s It worth worrying about. Not that we should fight / have rights
Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics by bigmadshoe on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @02:30PM (#49996899)
> once we're dead, it won't matter anyway

It sounds like something is worth worrying about if you foresee us being dead, presumably prematurely.

Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics by bamboozled on Thursday October 08, 2026 @07:03AM (#50004343)
Does worrying about something improve your situation?
Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics by pixl97 on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @11:19PM (#49987694)
I don't think you're paying much attention to how rapidly things like bipedal robots, and just robots in general are becoming far more capable very quickly.

The same GPU compute for LLMs runs robotic training models. Now in a few hours you can train a robot model that would have taken months 5 years ago. This model gets dumped into an actual physical robot with sensors all over and the suitability of the model is measured on robot tasks and the error in real world actions is fed back into the robot world model for further training.

> There have been experiments where an AI is given control of managing something like a vending machine

You sure you're not talking about experiments ran a couple of years ago? The more modern ones are getting wild.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/29/claude-opus-5-became-downr...

Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics by moomoo11 on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @01:28AM (#49988620)
can you share more about the robotics advances, what you are aware of? sounds very exciting.
Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics by jackb4040 on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @10:38AM (#49993503)
I don't quite understand the leap you're making between stochastic AI models for robotics (maybe with an LLM making api calls to it) and embodied AI / the rate of progress towards a singularity. Because they're both trained on a GPU? Up until 2022 GPUs were for video games and mining crypto, and neither of those produce a synergy that accelerates progress towards general intelligence either.
Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics by oblio on Thursday October 08, 2026 @04:02AM (#50003075)
I don't know if I should be amused or sad that our possible LLM overlords are petty little things, just like our existing human overlords.
Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics by CuriouslyC on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @11:40PM (#49987834)
There are already machine-controlled high throughput experimental machines for wetwork. AI will definitely do a better job than your average biochemist at planning, executing and analyzing these experiments just by virtue of the amount of thought it can put in to experiment selection.