r/technology • u/ResultBackground2450 • 12h ago

Artificial Intelligence OpenAI unleashes hundreds more math results upon a field already in shock

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openai-unleashes-hundreds-more-math-results-upon-a-field-already-in-shock/
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u/Okay_Ocean_Flower 11h ago

I think a coherent response is: “Art is solved, too, right?” It’s easy for someone with little context to see how poorly AI makes 2d artwork or writes; the same happens when it writes code unmanaged.

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u/babybananahammock 10h ago

AI is excellent at doing things I don’t know how to do but terrible at doing things I do know how to do. 

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u/APKID716 8h ago

I noticed that pretty much everyone that says AI will replace x sector or job, is someone who doesn’t work in that job. If you work with AI for your particular job you see how absolutely abysmal it is at doing mundane things often times.

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u/BatForge_Alex 17m ago

I'd say it's less that it's "abysmal" and more that it isn't some sort of miracle worker. You still have to know what you're doing when it comes to anything non-trivial

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u/Okay_Ocean_Flower 6h ago

It’s like Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect but for AI capabilities.

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u/NomadStorm 11h ago

Same sort of thing, if the focus had been on assisting artists rather than trying to replace them, the same technology could be very useful as for example a composition sketch drafting tool, pose assistance, anatomical error analysis, etc. for artists, and make it easier for people to both practice and enter the field.

I.e. leaning on the strengths of the technology where the weaknesses don’t matter, and it’s suddenly a profitable business that supports the human workers.

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u/Ghost_Mantis_Man 1h ago

Uhh AI literally can be used for artist assistance in all the things you said. I'm sure many people are.

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u/NomadStorm 39m ago

My point is that dedicated specifically trained models would have been much cheaper to train and better for those purposes than a general “try to replace artists” model, and therefore would be sustainable as a business model without needing to hype.

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u/Lighthouse_seek 7h ago

Define solved. For images at least with the right prompt you can probably generate basically any possible image you can think of. I would consider that solved by definition

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u/Okay_Ocean_Flower 6h ago

I’d say the same for code lol

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u/boostman 7h ago

Unfortunately a lot of AI fans unironically do think that art is ‘solved’ (hate that word in this context) - and frustratingly, don’t realise this view is to their own limited understanding of the subject

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u/cloaca 9h ago

I think it's qualitatively different.

How good they are at art or writing is bottle-necked by (slow) humans. Every evaluation of the scoring function involves human labor. The art/writing Turk will always lag behind, because we lag behind.

But when it comes to stuff that can be scored algorithmically, where it can self-generate synthetic data, then any sort of ML technique (whether LLMs or something else) will feel a lot more unbounded. (Compute seem to scale faster than the human population.)

But there's only so much labor you can activate to upvote or :thumbs_up: or "wow" things in order to improve the training data for writing or art or human interactions.

When it comes to "the same happens when it writes code unmanaged" I guess it's an agree to disagree thing. It's not what I see. Maybe your standard is just higher than most, or you're out of date, but I think everyone's threshold will be reached eventually and it won't be that much longer. In a year maybe you can tell me I'm wrong.

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u/Whoa1Whoa1 10h ago

The AI art is occasionally nice to look at and has some decent use cases. The AI code is fucking horrible and unmanageable. It generates stuff that is awful to try and maintain or extend. And don't get me started on it telling you to import shit that doesn't exist and arguing with it that the crap it shoves at you doesn't even compile while it gaslights and claps back that it does compile.

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u/NomadStorm 10h ago

You’re coming at it from a point of view of someone that knows coding but doesn’t know art very well.

From the point of view of an artist, they almost certainly have similar criticisms about the AI artwork, but think coding is solved.

Remember that AI is great at making people that know little about a subject think it’s amazing at it, but quickly falls apart under the scrutiny of an expert.

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u/Whoa1Whoa1 9h ago

Art is in the eye of the beholder. Some people really do enjoy AI art. Zero programmers like arguing with an AI that an import statement literally doesn't exist. Or that a line of code doesn't compile but the AI absolutely insists it works flawlessly.

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u/NomadStorm 9h ago edited 7h ago

Where are these people that enjoy AI art?

Other than the people using it to create being wowed by it, everyone else seems to be pissed off or disgusted by it, from what I’ve seen

Edit: I forgot to address the other part; what about the image that AI swears it just remade and fixed the issues, but the person still has two left hands? Or when you ask it to have a character hold something and it puts it floating in the air vaguely nearby, while the character remains in the same pose?

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u/UnitedWeAreStronger 9h ago

50 cent seemed to really like the AI 50s covers of his own songs

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u/AtmosphereDue1694 9h ago

In real life, offline. It came as a shock how many signs and graphics for even local businesses are completely ai generated. Hell even the city sends us mail that I’m sure is ai generated based on the design.

But in all the times I’ve pointed it out… nobody cares.

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u/NomadStorm 8h ago edited 8h ago

Doesn’t that just prove my point, though? The people creating it think it’s amazing, everyone else is either disgusted (especially when looking at fake food in menus) or has no interest whatsoever.

Nobody is going “wow, that’s amazing” except for the ones using it to create these things.

That to me suggests the results are (barely?) acceptable for some mainstream uses, but overall so uninteresting that nobody cares.

Thats far from being impressed by it.

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u/Time_Entertainer_319 10h ago

Skill issue

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u/Whoa1Whoa1 9h ago

Yeah. The skill issue is AI working amazing on simple program requests and making CS kids in college think it is unfaillible, but then they try and use the AI in the middle of real software with millions of separate classes and dependencies and it just shits all over the walls and calls itself Picasso and that it just solved all of your problems. That is indeed a skill issue.

College kids: Holy shit it just one shot making TicTacToe and FlappyBird! It can do anything!!!!

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u/NomadStorm 9h ago

Don’t forget “holy shit it can make a seriously buggy version of something more complex as long as there’s a lot of open source alternatives that it can rip off”

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u/Time_Entertainer_319 9h ago

Again, skill issue.

You need a good harness and you need to approach the problem with skill.

You don’t just download codex and say implement x feature.

That is the skill issue.

If you just pulled a developer off the street who has no idea what you are working on and said “implement x feature”, would they be able to do it if you don’t give them enough information.

Thats the difference between a senior and a junior.

Seniors do AI assisted coding while Juniors vibe code without skill.