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points by robswc 3 days ago | 0 comments
I'm incredibly skeptical about everything these frontier labs put out. Results are results though.

However, could someone with a firmer grasp on the problems weigh in on how much are these recent results are function of cutting a virtually unlimited budget for some very smart people? I believe the LLMs certainly help iterate on ideas faster... but I am aware of very impressive work that goes on in quantitative finance. Stuff that would not really be published. That stuff is the result of paying smart people millions to produce results which produce $$$.

I have to wonder, would this have been solved if we simply gathered tons of smart people and paid them a ton of money to solve it? Or is it exclusively because they had access to LLMs?

Could they have achieved this result with previous versions of ChatGPT?

[–] lg5689 3 days ago
Quant finance is very different from math research; quant is much more applied math and programming, and the tasks are typically smaller than math research questions. Although it's true there's a huge overlap in the people good at both, there is massive re-training needed if you want to turn non-math-phd quants into research mathematicians.

As I argued in another comment here, I think even with unlimited budget, humans wouldn't be able to reproduce these results within a few years. I think AI has crossed a superhuman theshhold in math problem solving skills.

[–] robswc 2 days ago
Sure. I can see how the problems being solved would be very different, and would require "re-training." I'm wondering though how much is it the LLMs and how much is it the humans driving them? Could this have been done with the models currently accessible? Could I have just prompted "solve this conjecture" and hand the work over to a PhD to verify? Or is it "unlimited budget" + "super smart ppl prompting" + "SOTA model" ?

I guess I just see this like how NASA went to the moon. In theory there wasn't a lot stopping us from going besides a good reason (and money). OpenAI has a good reason (PR) and money, so they're doing it. Will these things stop coming out after funding and motivation is no longer there? Or by next year will we have access to this model and anyone can solve any of these open conjectures with time + money?