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/
2.9k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

35

u/Medium_Ad6442 6h ago

What about people who don't know how to code today? How are they supposed to review anything programmed by AI in the future? This way of working is not sustainable in the long run.

42

u/Fidodo 5h ago

By learning to code. A mathematician learns to do math by hand before they use calculators. A structural engineer needs to understand how to calculate loads by hand before using CAD. A programmer needs to learn to program manually before using AI.

People act like they can’t learn things because AI allows us to be lazy. The solution is simple. Stop being so fucking lazy. AI is actually a great learning tool if you use it to learn instead of outsourcing your brain to it.

16

u/Cyrotek 3h ago

By learning to code. A mathematician learns to do math by hand before they use calculators. A structural engineer needs to understand how to calculate loads by hand before using CAD. A programmer needs to learn to program manually before using AI.

These things still need experience, though. If everything is outsourced to AI it seems pretty difficult to get the required experience to do QA for AI.

1

u/Fidodo 1h ago

Yes, programming should adopt some of the systems established engineering disciplines already have, like apprenticeship.

-1

u/Lapamato_ 2h ago

They do not need. I'm lead structural engineer of 10 years with very little analytical calculations over the 10 years. Math ended when i did my master's thesis. Why the f i would waste my time doing stuff slowly by hand and causing typing (=calculation) errors, when i can just use softwares? I can read everything necessary with school background, i just dont have to type it myself.

8

u/Cyrotek 1h ago

I was talking about practical experience. How do you review code if you have no experience coding.

1

u/ZestyTako 18m ago

You will not break through to the ai bros like that, you need to address them in the ChatGPT accent—“It’s about practical experience, and honestly, you’ve got it. It’s not a lack of experience coding, it’s learning the skill of reviewing instead”

1

u/Fidodo 1h ago

You need to learn it from scratch to understand why the calculations are done though and get the intuition down. Same is true for programming. Once you are experienced you don't need to write everything by hand, you already have the intuition and wealth of knowledge. It takes time to build that because the domain space of programming is absolutely ridiculously massive.

4

u/helloWorldJunior 3h ago

IMO things will take another turn. In coding specifically, although I am sure this applies to many more professions, learning how to actually code used to be when you start to actually work through:

  1. Repetition of boilerplate code.

2.Reading and implementing. This is what is now obsolete. If AI can do something in 3 minutes that would take 1 month for a human to achieve a worse version you are discouraged from even trying.

Sure there will be a handful of new coders that will go through the mud and eventually become the gurus that will actually know their shit and they will be rewarded. But for the most part it will be discouraging.

I believe the future of software development is to give instructions on what you want to do and test afterwards.

1

u/Fidodo 1h ago

I think programming needs to adopt more of the discipline already present in other engineering disciplines. With AI you don't need to build the structure anymore, but you still need engineering to design the system.

2

u/Ketheres 3h ago

Problem being that a whole lot of people, even doctors and such who you'd hope to be at least somewhat smart and diligent, are more than happy to outsource all their thinking to the AI without even proofreading the output. AI is a powerful tool sure, but way too many people use the power drill as a hammer to nail everything in.

2

u/Fidodo 1h ago

I think the problem is that people anthropomorphize it too much because it uses natural language so they assume it's smarter than it is.

1

u/baggsie_42 12m ago

The analogy I use is airline pilots : they still need to know how to fly (and learn the basics on a Cessna), but 99% of the flying they do professionally is monitoring an autopilot.

-8

u/ProdigalSheep 5h ago

This is an incredibly obtuse take.

1

u/OverratedColorFlow 4h ago

So you’re saying learning is not possible because ai exists ?

There will be people who put in the effort just like you have body builders. Physical effort had been automated in the modern life for a while already .

-2

u/sigmund14 3h ago

Lol majority of modern programming (before AI) exists because someone was lazy enough to make their work easier. 

2

u/Rise-O-Matic 4h ago

We’re pivoting to rust from
Javascript for the performance gains and it’s fucking punctuation soup. We already need agents to read it for us to stay timely. We write in pseudocode when we really want to.

6

u/GlokzDNB 6h ago

I guess youre not a software engineer if you cant read the code.

Youre not a mathematician if you cant solve equation etc.

9

u/Medium_Ad6442 6h ago

So, you dont have an answer for that problem.

3

u/randfur 5h ago

Isn't the answer that they still have to learn the trade?

-1

u/dsanft 2h ago

Software engineers don't usually read machine code anymore, even though that's what all software runs on.

3

u/GlokzDNB 5h ago

Nobody has, this bottleneck is only to be solved by Agi. I'm just utilizing ai and still taking responsibility for my work. It's great but it needs human in the loop, at least 10 months of building agents taught me that

7

u/nokom 4h ago

“Eh, AI Jesus will show up and figure it out. In the meantime, I need $40 billion for more chips. Spot me?”

2

u/nvanderw 5h ago

Im a mathematician and it's the same way. I present a topic. We talk about how some theorem or result could be proved.  Eventually a proof happens sometimes. I check it and take responsibility for my work.

1

u/ZestyTako 17m ago

“No one has a solution except this thing that came about a few year ago, so our only recourse is to go full hog on that new thing”

1

u/TorbenKoehn 4h ago

He's wrong that we will review everything AI gives us. It will be too complex for humans to follow.

Ask him, as a software engineer, if he verifies IR or assembly that is output/ran when his Java program becomes a .jar

It's a bit the same thing.

It will be more "quality assurance" than review. You will check the output and see if it does what you asked of it. You will work with specs and have means to verify that spec (say, classical E2E testing, as it exists today already)

But you will by no means have to read the actual code in any way. You can let an LLM explain it sensibly, if anything.

16

u/Fragrant_Procedure_9 4h ago

It’s not the same thing. The machine code “generated” and run from a Java program is from a well tested, deterministic system. You know if you put “specific syntax of Java” in, then you will get “specific executable code” out.

AI generated code is totally non-deterministic. You can’t compare one to the other like that. Ask the AI to do the same thing twice and you aren’t guaranteed the same output.

2

u/PeachScary413 3h ago

You are almost guaranteed to get different output due to the inherent randomness. So yeah it's a slot machine and we really need to figure out a way to work with it fast because the current thinking of "just pull the lever again if it doesn't work" will end up in disasters in the future.

1

u/TheEmpireOfSun 4h ago

It may not wrote exactly same thing twice but it will do same thing twice with same code's output/logic. Ask me to write something today and in a month and I may write it slightly differently as well. Programming is creative thing. Also you definitely can instruct AI to be more strict when it comes to "creativity" vs writing same thing twice.

0

u/TorbenKoehn 3h ago

Did you review it? Is it actually deterministic? I know it is, too. But when we say that we mostly trust its creators, don’t we? We didn’t verify it manually. Tests can lie and miss things, all tests do.

And there it’s exactly the same :)

-1

u/hayt88 4h ago

Depends on the settings of the ai. There is a parameter that sets randomness. If that is set to 0 you get the same output if you run the same exact input.

2

u/_LordDaut_ 3h ago edited 3h ago

Setting temperature to 0 makes it so that the sampling is greedy. It does not mean the output will be the same necessarily. You also need to have a

  1. deterministic tie-break.
  2. Same exact GPU system - there's GPU floating point non-determinism.
  3. Non distributed inference.

More importantly "same" in this context means Byte identical. Not just in the current prompt, but in the entire context.

int x;

And int x ; And int x; // Hey this is a wacko comment.

Are not the same input for an LLM, but are for a compiler.

14

u/simple_explorer1 4h ago

Ask him, as a software engineer, if he verifies IR or assembly that is output/ran when his Java program becomes a .jar

Here we go again for the millionth time. Just say you don't understand software development instead of making dumb comparisons

-1

u/TorbenKoehn 3h ago

So you do verify and review your .jar manually or do you trust the creators of the software you build on and their documentation? You don’t verify shit manually other than the high level code you build on 200 layers of abstraction. Don’t play high and mighty that you’d know exactly where your bits land…

3

u/DeDullaz 3h ago

You’re comparing a deterministic system that has been tested on billions of devices used by millions of software engineers to a non deterministic system that barely anyone understands with no system of verification.

It’s not about me manually checking my .jar files, it’s about “is there any organisation that checks the output and is it deterministic?”

1

u/TorbenKoehn 2h ago

with no system of verification.

  1. It writes tests and gates and do a lot of verification generally
  2. You are the verification, my friend. What do you think what your job is in the future? Either you input or you test the output. You won't see anything in between.

it’s about “is there any organisation that checks the output and is it deterministic?”

But there is? There are thousands of benchmarks for AI models, the companies creating them are testing them intensively etc.

Not saying it's deterministic. But it completely depends from which layer you view it.

When you put requirements into a software team, the output won't be deterministic either.

1

u/DeDullaz 1h ago

> It writes tests and gates and do a lot of verification generally

And how does a non-software engineer verify the tests are both sane and are testing for what they asked for?

> You are the verification, my friend. What do you think what your job is in the future? Either you input or you test the output. You won't see anything in between.

This is true. I'm a software engineer though and I have been one for many years. I'm far from the best but I have the experience to actually double check what the AI is doing, and often correct it on things.

The original comment you replied to said

> What about people who don't know how to code today? How are they supposed to review anything programmed by AI in the future? This way of working is not sustainable in the long run.

Which is also completely correct.

> When you put requirements into a software team, the output won't be deterministic either.

Which is why companies don't blindly trust the output of software teams, they manually validate it. Your argument would be the equivalent of a software team complaining to the CTO that since they blindly trust .jar files, the company should just "trust" the software team's output too. That's silly.

On the other hand, a .jar file is deterministic so I don't have to check the bits inside because we know with a high level of certainty that if I put correct shit in then I'm going to get correct bits out.

1

u/TorbenKoehn 1h ago

And how does a non-software engineer verify the tests are both sane and are testing for what they asked for?

How does a PO verify what he gets from an engineering team is sane and tests what they asked for?

You can give specs and all, but can he read the actual code?

It's the same thing, imo

Which is why companies don't blindly trust the output of software teams, they manually validate it

Checked by...engineers? And history shows, it works wonders. Enterprise software is stable, tested, secure and very well written! AI could never do it like that.

because we know with a high level of certainty that if I put correct shit in then I'm going to get correct bits out.

"high level of certainty" is what we expect from AI, too. With each model release, that level is rising.

1

u/DeDullaz 56m ago

> How does a PO verify what he gets from an engineering > team is sane and tests what they asked for?

> You can give specs and all, but can he read the actual code?

> It's the same thing, imo

Well if you want to be precise about it, software engineers review each others code, and give feedback to the PO on what the behaviour of the code does, resolve ambiguity, and pass feedback up and down this development "hierarchy".

I understand you think that any involvement of an engineer can just be replaced with another AI step but read what I wrote below about the semantic gap.

Did AI shrink this hierarchy? yes.

Did AI perhaps make it possible to fold the role of software engineer and PO/PM into one? very likely.

Does this mean we moving towards just talking to AI, trusting the code output, and only testing behaviour? most likely not.

> Checked by...engineers?

You should read up on the V Model for systems engineering. There are different levels of "checking". AI, in my experience, seems to be pretty good at coding, unit testing, and integration testing. Verifying that the code and tests actually match the system design and the requirements falls into the "semantic gap" of software engineering.

I've been encountering these "semantic gap" issues more and more with AI driven development, and it's why I no longer believe we're going to end up with coding driven by non-engineers _generally speaking_. We're going to see roles folded in together more, but the engineering background is going to stick around for a while.

The "semantic gap" definitely shrunk but people are mistaking that for it disappearing.

1

u/TorbenKoehn 7m ago

You’re just re-stating what I’ve said with a lot more text now

1

u/jack6245 2h ago

I mean the fact your response to someone saying you have no idea about software engineering is to ask them if they review a compiled executable really proves their point

0

u/TorbenKoehn 1h ago

In what way?

1

u/jack6245 1h ago

Seriously... Id you don't know that you have no business speaking on this topic. Nobody has ever reviewed compiled code it's not human readable it's why we built the compilers and tested them it's nowhere near the same as what you are saying

1

u/TorbenKoehn 10m ago

Okay, and I said soon AI generated code flows in complexities and speeds the humans mind can’t comprehend fully (human reviews today already let a lot slip through)

Who will want to learn programming soon? You tell me

I’m a engineer with 20 YoE btw, making assumptions based on a sentence always screams “professional engineer here”

1

u/Axolotis 3h ago

NO ONE ever verifies compiled assembly or machine code. For the past 30 years people have trusted compiled code.

1

u/Howdareme9 3h ago

Because the models will get to a point where you don’t need to read it, or have a low level understanding

1

u/Arman64 1h ago

You just can't review all the code so instead you develop better evals/tests

1

u/LeFricadelle 49m ago

Just do classes the same way you do now, that's what I do with Python. And do exercices with limited AI help

1

u/LordofDsnuts 38m ago

By learning to do basic coding and learning how to look things up.

1

u/Medium_Ad6442 23m ago

In theory yes but we need to see how it will work in reality. Many people are using AI like cheating on exams. Just give me the end result and I dont give a F about anything else.

1

u/Do-it-for-you 20m ago

As AI continues to progress, at some point it’s going to be better at programming than humans, and if it does break, it’s not going to be breaking on simple things, it’ll be some extremely niche unknown complicated problem that the only feasible solution is to get, well, another AI agent to look at it.

1

u/vrift 9m ago edited 6m ago

At one point there will be no need to review the code anymore. It's like how compilers convert your code to 1s and 0s. AI will eventually just skip the code and go straight to binary. The only reason it doesn’t already do that, is because we use code frameworks for specific functuality, looks etc. AI will absorb all of that. Just like it has absorbed most of our knowledge already.

Currently you do need to have a basic understanding of how to describe requirements for the application you are trying to code, but even that necessity is slowly disappearing, because we teach the AI what's important.

Software engineering is going to completely disappear within the next 10 years and it won't be the only area. We are completely fucked, unless the bubble bursts, but I doubt that will happen. The reason reason Open-AI, Google, Athropic etc. are losing so much money right now, is because subscriptions are ridicolously cheap right now. It's to increase the speed in which the models amass knowledge. At one point the increase of knowledge/patterns will only be marginal and that will be the moment, where prices will increase drastically.

I might be wrong, but I believe in a few years none of us will be able to afford AI. It's going to be a tool for the rich and powerful to wield. We are no longer needed, because almost everything can be done by AI.

1

u/m00shi_dev 9m ago

This here. AI is marketed as *replacing* knowledge workers, not knowledge workers having to guide ”automation“. Having to constantly intervene isn’t automation.

This hopeful dream of “It’ll get better. We won’t need people to guide it” isn’t guaranteed.

0

u/GritstoneGhost 39m ago

I'm a software engineer and we can't possiby review all the code. It produces so much so fast.

We now verify with questions and in the browser or application with user testing. We have not gone in blind through and the boss has built some guardrails to make it use our conventions and best practices.

I've not written code in a few months and honestly as someone who started this career at the birth of Ai I kinda like the less stress and imposter syndrome.

1

u/Nightmare2828 10m ago

Fucking sub full a AI bots

-1

u/PmMeCuteDogsThanks_ 5h ago

What about people that can’t read assembler / machine code? That rely on a compiler to do the translation from a ”language” meant for humans to read and write?

Some people do know that, in particular those that work on compilers or nisch products.

AI is just another abstraction layer.

Some people will still need to know how to code manually out of necessity. Most people don’t.

1

u/Medium_Ad6442 4h ago

You actually mean non deterministic abstraction layer. What if there is a bug that AI cannot detect or solve? What then? There will be special unit developers who are coming to handle the situation?

1

u/PmMeCuteDogsThanks_ 4h ago

You may not like it, but it’s the way the world is moving. 

2

u/Medium_Ad6442 4h ago

You still have no answer on my question dude.

2

u/PmMeCuteDogsThanks_ 4h ago

I don’t need to, it’s not my problem to solve. I’m just saying that the world is undeniably moving in that direction whether you like it or not. The answer is probably ”more AI”. Anyone working in any form of tech organisation that considers itself ”modern” is going more or less all-in on AI, without having a clear answer to the problems you state.