Hacker News

points by lg5689 3 days ago | 0 comments

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?