Hacker News Reader

Comment by furyofantares | Hacker News Reader

It says it took them a decade, but they obviously published loads of intermediate results, as did anyone else working in the space.

I get that they asked it about a new result they hadn't published yet, but the idea that it did it in two days when it took them a decade -- even though it's been trained on everything published in that decade, including whatever intermediate results they published -- probably makes this claim just as absurd as it sounds.

View on HN

I’d bet the hypothesis was already in the training data. Someone probably suggested it in the future work section of some other paper.

One of the annoying things about the LZW compression patent was that it covered something Lempel and Ziv had already mentioned in the further study section of their original paper. Someone patented an “exercise left to the reader”.

Maybe, but:

> He told the BBC of his shock when he found what it had done, given his research was not published so could not have been found by the AI system in the public domain.

and,

> Critically, this hypothesis was unique to the research team and had not been published anywhere else. Nobody in the team had shared their findings.

I guess, but pretty much every LLM is trained with data outside the public domain--whether they admit to it, or not.

Since a Google product output the result, it had access to the same knowledge base as Google itself - Search, Scholar, etc. And use of copyrighted data for research purposes has always been, as far as I know, considered fair use in AI training.

Unfortunately, even if we wanted to, it might be impossible to attribute this success to the authors that it built upon.

> considered fair use in AI training

By AI trainers, if not by the authors whose works were encoded.

>outside the public domain

public domain is a legal term meaning something like "free from copyright or license restrictions"

I believe in this thread people mean not that but "published and likely part of the training corpus"

Right, the actual result they asked about was not published. But do a search for the author, they indeed have published loads of related stuff in the last decade even if not that actual result and even if not directly pointing at it.

"New hammer builds house in hours that took construction workers months." Reads the same to me. They introduced a new tool to help with a task that sounds like it was already near completion.

It is still a big accomplishment if the AI helped them solve the problem faster than they could have without it, but the headline makes it sound like it solved the problem completely from scratch.

This kind of hyperbole is what makes me continue to be skeptical of AI. The technology is unquestionably impressive and I think it's going to play a big role in technology and advancement moving forward. But every breakthrough comes with such a mountain of fluff that it's impossible to sort the mundane from the extraordinary and it all ends up feeling like a marketing-driven bubble waiting to burst.

Tentative rephrasing: "When given all of the facts we uncovered over a decade as premises, the computer system generated the conclusion instantly"

edit - instantly is apparently many hours, hence the 'two days', just to be clear

The professor does not publish it yet because they need to do experiments for testing hypotheses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com