The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
Reading the paper, doing the set of experiments for one of the problems cost $800-1.4k. Extremely affordable!
This isn't as impressive as 'LLMs good at abstract math' would be, though. This is basically making a million copies of a smart 14 year old, telling them each to randomly tweak programs in ways that seem interesting, and running an evolutionary process on top of that for programs with high scores on some metric. As opposed to taking a LLM and teaching it 1000 math textbooks and then it spontaneously proving new theorems. Which is a thing that this paper, notably, very much doesn't do. But, you know, another paper totally might in 5 years, the field's moving quickly.
But the discovered functions are less triumphs of machine thought and more like random blobs of if statements and additions with a bunch of simple patterns (eg fig 4b, 5b, 6b). Even that's quite useful.
DM claims that the code generated is clear enough that human evaluators can notice obvious patterns and symmetries, which would certainly accelerate things.
As far as I'm concerned, this is only the first step, PaLM 2 isn't a particularly good model, and the fact that this works at all makes it a good bet that I'll only continue to get better.
If I had to set a date on when I expect:
It would be closer to three years, but since you and I are in agreement that it's going to happen, and soon, there's not much else to do but wait and see.
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