For years, one of the easiest ways to dismiss AI has been:<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just predicts the next token.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Technically, that may describe part of the machinery. But it is becoming a terrible description of the capability.<\/p>\n OpenAI has now released a broad batch of mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model. The company says that model has resolved more than 100 long-standing open problems across much of mathematics, and it is publishing results, formalizations, and research details for scrutiny.<\/p>\n If the proofs hold up, something important has changed. You can call the system a next-token predictor, but that no longer settles the matter.<\/p>\n A telescope is \u201cjust curved glass.\u201d A jet engine is \u201cjust metal pushing hot gas.\u201d Neither description tells you what the machine can accomplish.<\/p>\n People hear \u201cpredicts the next token\u201d and smuggle in an extra conclusion: therefore it cannot reason, discover, or produce genuinely new mathematics.<\/p>\n That conclusion now has to survive contact with the evidence presented today.<\/p>\n There is still plenty to verify. Mathematics is unusually unforgiving, and extraordinary claims should survive independent checking.<\/p>\n But if these results stand, the argument changes.<\/p>\n There is a larger lesson here, and it has nothing specifically to do with AI.<\/p>\n Never become so attached to your explanation of yesterday that you cannot recognize what changed today.<\/p>\n The mechanism may be the same. Your description may still be technically correct. But new results can change what that mechanism means in practice.<\/p>\n When the terrain changes, the map has to change with it.<\/p>\n RW For years, one of the easiest ways to dismiss AI has been: \u201cIt just predicts the next token.\u201d Technically, that may describe part of the machinery. But it is becoming a terrible description of the capability. OpenAI has now released a broad batch of mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model. The company says […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=633"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":634,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions\/634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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