The purpose of the strikes is to increase the cost to continue the war. You said in another comment that Putin is a psychopath who will always find a way to more money, but what you have not considered is that at a certain point this will become more and more difficult. Resources are finite. It’s the proverbial immovable object vs irresistible force, except without the poetic license: at some point, it will be clear that either immovable and/or irresistible are just words, and that underlying them is a reality that is not just words but made of a finite amount of will, manpower, and firepower. It’s too early to say the war will go one way or another - and it’s a big mistake to underestimate Russia - but to answer your question, the attack is “good” because that’s how you fight a war. Most of the world wants Russia to lose and therefore it is good, for us. Us is someone, just like for some Z people out there it’s good when Russia destroys a hospital, school, Ukrainian print shop, etc… bc terrorism is part of their strategy. We will see what happens.
> All this new knowledge is arriving at a pace much greater than the field’s ability to process it
That’s the whole issue: it’s not knowledge, it’s data. AI can not provide an account for the proofs, or be questioned about them, or organize a talk exposing the idea because there’s no understanding behind any of it.
This is what Tao has been saying; that the results, in the strictest sense, were never the goal. It is ultimately the understanding (that previously was required to form a proof) that is valuable.
Why wouldn’t the AI be able to answer questions about the proofs or organize a talk? Those are pretty much the things it excels at, exploring and summarizing previous knowledge. The problem is the volume of questions and data a human needs to step through to arrive at the same understanding.
Apparently, the knowledge isn't in the data set, and the explanations are gobbledygook. They certainly summarize well, but it seems that if the "understanding" isn't already baked in, then expanding the source description doesn't really clarify it. Maybe in the future?
What does apparently here mean? Is there an account of an expert sharing their attempts to get a model to explain the results and key ideas to them (for a topic they're familiar with) in an interactive session, and having it fail?
For somebody deeply familiar with a topic and all the nuance around the problem and approaches that didn't work, I'd be quite surprised if they couldn't cajole it into explaining what finally did work in terms they understand. Unless it turned out that these proofs were just well beyond anything humans were anywhere near being able to figure out, in which case, no great loss that the AI figured it out because we were nowhere near it.
To humans? To check if the explanations actually make sense we would have to pause the new AI in while it's rediscovering the result and steer it with the explanation to see if it arrives at the result faster or slower/same.
It very well may be that explnations need to be further explained until they don't sound like gobbledygook to humans. If that's harder than arriving at the result then it's a sign of how far ahead AI actually is.
Fair, “answers” is probably more precise than “knowledge.” That gap between answers and understanding is the whole point of the post, so I think we mostly agree.
But understanding to what end? I'm if it's for the pure aesthetic experience of engaging in the beauty of math than that's fine, but that's typically not the view from my experience.
The goal of understanding is to advance the field, since historically human understanding was the only way to do this.
For the vast majority of human history, the world we experienced was a strange and unintelligible space. Humans survived at the by the grace of forces beyond their control. For a brief window of time human existed in a world where they increasingly saw a relationship between their understanding of the world and there ability to steer their environment towards a desired outcome.
I believe now we're seeing that that was a historical anomaly. The world is once again entering a state where it becomes increasingly unintelligible to us. Nick Land already famously pointed out, many decades ago, that the global financial system is already a form of "artificial intelligence" we don't really control. We're seeing that spread wider and wider.
The world making sense peaked around 1960s and has continued to breakdown ever since.
Does that mean AI is not doing something useful? If it provides a proof, it gives direction to human mathematicians who can then develop an understanding, give talks, be questioned about the topic, and teach. Is that not a useful service?
It might well be useful if the RIGHT proofs are evaluated and proven. Figuring out what will be useful has always been a real challenge in math. Finding certain symmetries and mappings between problems in different domains, might well be useful even if they aren't well understood? That has always been another part of the work of mathematicians. Of course there are those who just work on the beauty of things, and few in the 80s would have thought that prime factoring number theory or elliptic curves would be the basis for modern communications and banking.
That said, getting a point solution and not knowing the path to get there, is certainly much less useful, and generalization is much harder. Again, more work for mathematicians, but maybe without the easy "I solved it" proof metric for rewards. Goodhart's law strikes again.
Less useful, but still useful. If robot Ramanujan gives us answers with no mortal-understandable justification, but it's always right, that still gives decades or centuries of topics to try to build theory around, with the motivational benefit that you always know that what you're working on can be solved. Simply treat it as an oracle that dispenses magical opaque proof certificates.
I don't think that's the argument. In my opinion this is like paying to unlock characters, à la EA. Who's going to feel a sense of accomplishment by just trying to interpret what an LLM spat out? Sure,maybe the results will be used by someone in some field, the same way a product manager uses what the development team developed. Is the PM going to give talks about it? Are they going to expand on those developments and come up with something new?
> Who's going to feel a sense of accomplishment by just trying to interpret what an LLM spat out?
I think you have a point, but this is the reality we have to face. The genie is out of the bottle. Even if OpenAI stops publishing AI-generated proofs, it's only a matter of months before tools with similar capabilities are in everyone's hands.
I guess the issue with that is that the understanding is important to mathematicians. The majority of people outside mathematics don’t understand it whether it’s humans doing the work or AI. If AI can generate useful results more quickly, then to the general public it is more valuable.
Mathematical solutions aren’t valuable to the general public at all, other than the passing fancy that comes from reading headlines and news articles.
Mathematics is only useful to the extent that we can do something with it, and I would guess that still requires human mathematicians to understand it.
Usually, a product that costs $100 costs me the same $100 regardless of the payment processors involved (and $100 cash when none are involved), so I can't see where "lower prices for consumers" could come from.
I've seen few places accepting only cash or cards from a local payment processor. And it looks like local payment processor takes about 0.16% from each transaction.
So I assume that if they were accepting more expensive cards, they might've increase the price of the $100.16 product for me, to offset their costs.
And yes, I also heard that payment processors have rules that require merchants to have the same price no matter what payment processor (or cash) customer will choose.
There are many other options already besides Visa and Mastercard. What I'm asking and nobody wants to answer is what the benefits for users are. The first thing you should think about when making a new product or service.
People are only answering me here with benefits for European politicians and their sovereignty. That's alright. But what I'm asking about is benefits for the users.
For example, Visa and Mastercard offer fraud protection to the users, and many card emitters offer cashback to their users. Can this new European system offer this? If not, why not? Can they offer something else which benefits the user over current providers?
> What I'm asking and nobody wants to answer is what the benefits for users are.
I answered that it will lower prices, does that not count as a benefit to users?
Even if merchants pay the processing fees, those prices are inevitably passed onto their customers. With more competition among payment processors there will be pressure to lower processing fees.
All of this happens automatically. It’s the beauty of markets.
I’ll rephrase your own question in a different way that I think actually supports my point: Since there is no difference, as a product, between visa, Mastercard, and this new European alliance, then there is very little reason to not want more competition.
Payment processing is essentially a commodity in this sense. It’s all the same, with the differentiator being supply. If we increase the supply the price will go down. That’s it. It should honestly be stupid to not want a European alternative.
> I answered that it will lower prices, does that not count as a benefit to users?
Very fair point! Although we haven't seen it online after many years of national digital payment systems in Europe.
The only places where I've actually see discounts offered for non-card payments is in physical small businesses if you ask for a discount for this kind of payment. Places like the mechanics. But such payment isn't cross-border.
> It should honestly be stupid to not want a European alternative.
More options are always better, but to me it seems that the benefit for the customer is always forgotten in these projects. The customer is king, and only the most hardcore EU loyalists would actively hurt their own interests just to follow things like this.
The problem with your argument is that the price to the consumer stays the same, regardless of the payment processor involved (or cash when none are involved.) These are the rules set by payment processors. With these rules, the prices will stay the same with any amount of the supply. If these rules are changed, all payment processors will suffer in cash's favour, and as governments oppose cash-based economy for tax maximisation, the change of the rules is unlikely.
We may be talking past each other. If card processing costs a business money, that cost is passed onto the consumer. It therefore stands to reason that the converse is also true with savings. The question remaining is just at what time scale.
I think you’re taking about a single transaction in the near future, whereas I’m talking about the effects which are felt, in aggregate, over a long period of time. Absolutely things will get slightly cheaper.
It currently costs 100€ to buy something. 90% of their customers pay card and the rest cash. Their profit margin is 5% and the payment processor takes 2%, leaving 93% other costs not part of this discussion.
Now, the same item is still 100€ but some Europeans are paying with their cards by these cheaper payment processors. They charge only 1% per transaction. Also half of the card payers use these rather than the status quo. Therefore the merchant gains a percentage of profit on 45% of their transactions.
They can now lower their price to compete better. So the new price becomes something like 99.55€ for everybody: cash, visa, European cards.
Then, visa and Mastercard will lower their prices, to not lose customers in Europe, matching them, and now the price has fully gone to 99€, for everyone.
In Italy the price is the same by law regardless of how you pay. So it stands to reason savings go to the merchants and eventually the customers, rather than having a multi-tier price.
Too many things have to line up exactly the way you imagine for this to happen, and I think your scenario is too optimistic as a result. Specifically, the merchants "can now lower their price" but they might not do it, especially considering that the costs of integration with this system are probably non-zero for them.
Wizz is a Hungarian (so: European) airline (since 2003) and girocard is a German (so: European) instant low-fee payment system (it's been rebranded in 2007 from EC-Karte that existed since 1960s). At this moment, as far as I'm aware, you cannot pay for your Wizz ticket with girocard (they only accept Visa/MC/Amex or "co-branded" girocards.)
The price difference would have to be significantly more than 1 to 3% to justify the inconvenience of carrying around cash again for me as a consumer for the things I don't buy online. Also don't underestimate the benefits of not dealing with cash for the merchants either. After cash usage almost vanishing completely they made it mandatory to accept cash a couple of years ago in Norway in an attempt to keep the infrastructure on life support in case of crisis (but still illegal for big transactions like cars and houses because something something crime). At least one hairdresser chain notably resolved it by only accepting pre booked appointments, which you could only get along pre paying for them in an app.
YMMV, but I still carry cash and find no inconvenience in this. Cash is never out of battery, never out of software support, and unaffected by AWS outages, cellular outages, or electricity outages. I also don't install apps that are supposed to make life convenient for others but not me. WRT that hairdresser chain, I suppose I'd simply use a different hairdresser that would accept both walk-ins and cash, and I'd hope there's no shortage of such.
There are not many other options already besides Visa/MC for their payment network, not the branding. Interbank account transfers with instant settlement are clumsy.
The change is that newer financial systems, using ISO20022, run at bank level, allow instant net settlement between individual accounts, not just settlement at the bank level.
So the benefits to merchants/customers compared to Visa/MC:
Merchants
* Interchange is much cheaper, because the banks transact via the central clearing house which is usually sponsored by the country's reserve bank
* It allows for the merchant to set up direct debit payment structures that allow for things like subscriptions and other payments to be made with similar network and transaction fee savings
* It has all of the advantages of EFT and CC payments
* It can use QR codes, email addresses, and mobile numbers as identifiers, so it is much easier to pass on payment details. Merchants can operate with just a printed QR code, verifying payment on the customer's mobile.
Customers
* Banks can offer all of the same "perks" of credit cards, like lines of credit, branding, account holder offers.
* They can offer things like product insurance and return protection and similar consumer protections.
The "rails" are much cheaper to run and suits a 21st century financial system and is easier and more secure for consumers.
What banks "can offer" is irrelevant until they offer it in practice.
As a customer, I have zero interest in paying for my lunch via "QR codes, email addresses, and mobile numbers" when I can do it with near-zero friction with a double-click on a phone (funded by a credit card), or with a tap or swipe of the credit card. I also have better protections. Switching costs are non-zero and I will only switch if there are some substantial benefits; pure "feature parity" is a reason to not switch.
The benefits to merchants are tangential to me, but there is a substantial downside of all the merchants having to do integration with an additional system.
These systems have been rolling out across Asia and EU and other places.
If CCs were the system of the last 75 years to allow quick transactions, these systems are the next generation.
The US is a specific banking market that has a very embedded structure, regulation, and players. Other nations have a more flexible financial system that allows for services to develop that are better than the existing Visa/MC duopoly.
This is just the next step of allowing them to operate cross-border/jurisdiction.
The fact that you have zero interest does not mean there are many small merchants and customers that find the ability to easily transfer money instantly with very low fees and the same safety as cash is a very useful service.
Plato wrote about a lot of these kinds of words in the dialogue Cratylus. The dialogue is about more than just etymology, of course, but it’s worth looking at if the subject is interesting to you.
Very well put. I've also heard it said like this, "abusing the truth is the easiest way to lie".
The pattern is 1. take something that's true then 2. use it to imply the Truth. Step 3. is if anyone doubts 2, challenge them to disprove 1. Even if you don't deny that 1 is true and just challenging that 2 doesn't follow from 1, the waters have already been muddied in the eyes of many onlookers.
It's silly that this works but there's so much over-communication now that simplicity is very effective. People often repeat the fallacies verbatim too.
Has anyone seen the corridor crew's green screen ML project? They're on YT and they trained a model by using 3d objects, which have perfect transparency, and then adding post facto green/blue screens. Surprisingly, very little training data was needed as the data that was used was perfect by construction. I think right now it's the best plugin of its kind in the world, and they built the prototype in like a weekend.
What I think this illustrates very clearly is this type of technology responds very well to good data, and that to have good data you need to have a clear goal.
This is why it seems that alignment for a generalized, chat-style AI is a very hard problem, perhaps impossible. You can't align it to solve a certain kind of problem and keep it general to any question. The two goals are in conflict with each other.
I think it was Sam Altman himself who said (I don't remember when or where, sorry) that the reason he was so confident in this technology was he noticed the gigantic leaps it made in certain areas in response to even a small amount of training.
(This is why LLMs are so strong at coding, because it's overrepresented in training data. My guess is that if you ask a frontier model about makeup, you will see it repeat cosmetic company's copy rather than getting a chemistry lesson.)
This makes perfect sense but it does seem to kind of be at odds with the concept of a general AI whose job is simply to be smart at any goal. How do you train for any goal?
I guess in a way the AI makers suffer from the same problem that we humans do. We would all love a solution to everything, but to do that you need to define the goal. I'm not sure if that's a tractable problem.
I'm guessing the future is more geared towards specialized AI that are very good at solving the problem they were trained to do, and a human who knows how to breakdown a larger goal into smaller ones by composing the solution out of these models. This also seems like the more efficient solution as well, and better aligned with other goals like privacy and safeguarding of IP.
> This is why it seems that alignment for a generalized, chat-style AI is a very hard problem, perhaps impossible. You can't align it to solve a certain kind of problem and keep it general to any question. The two goals are in conflict with each other.
I think this problem is going to be solved soon (hopefully), check out for the Persimmon model[0] from Humans&. They train it to mimic humans, it may seems bad but it could be _really_ useful to train an AI to be aligned to humans and understand their goals really well since they can use Persimmon to create a "fake human" following a defined goal that their big AI model will learn to estimate.
It's still early but I think this is what they are heading toward.
I think we should start training models to guess intentions. That's the whole game. e.g. If I dislike a particular short form video, what are the specific intentions I am conveying to the recommender system, (general category I don't like, the time at which it was shown, the combination of feed in which it came), these are all intentions I am trying to convey. In websites google analytics helps with clickstream tracking (or clickstream analysis, user journey mapping or behavioral tracking.) — the sequence of clicks and pages you move through is your clickstream, and analyzing it to infer intent. The same thing will need to happen in chatbots. Can a chatbot infer the specific instance of the problem I want to solve?
> This is why LLMs are so strong at coding, because it's overrepresented in training data. My guess is that if you ask a frontier model about makeup, you will see it repeat cosmetic company's copy rather than getting a chemistry lesson.)
ChatGPTs response to the question “I want to learn about makeup”, gave me an overview of what makeup does, how it affects perceived structure, complexion, evenness, geometry, texture, etc.
When you then ask “the chemistry of makeup”, it goes into interesting breadth and depth without seeming like proprietary information. I do t get “corporate PR or marketing” vibes.
The only problem is, there’s a lot of money tied up and openAi and Anthropic, who are incentivised to convince the world that the general approach is the money making one.
Not that he got it all right or anything like that but it’s amazing how much of the current macro discussion around AI capabilities is covered in the Foundation series which was published over many years, 1942 to 1993.
If I were a business, I wouldn't want my proprietary business information into a hands of a competitor. But CEOs are racing to do it, and (at best) relying in flimsy contractual guarantees they have no means to verify.
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