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PontifexCipher

48 karma · joined January 3, 2025

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PontifexCipher··on Using an open model feels surprisingly good
No, my point is that it's a post on a personal blog not a peer reviewed paper.
PontifexCipher··on Using an open model feels surprisingly good
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
PontifexCipher··on John Jumper: AI is revolutionizing scientific discovery [video]
This is not just PR and is very interesting. However, in my view, (and from a quick read of the paper) this is actually a very classical method in applied math work:

- Build a complex intractable mathematical model (here, Navier-Stokes)

- Approximate it with a function approximator (here, a Physics Informed Neural Network)

- Use the some property of function approximator to search for more solutions to the original model (here, using Gauss-Newton)

In a sense, this is actually just the process of model-based science anyway: use a model for the physical world and exploit the mathematics of the model for real-world effects.

This is very very good work, but this heritage goes back to polynomial approximation even from Taylor series, and has been the foundation of engineering for literal centuries. Throughout history, the approximator keeps getting better and better and hungrier and hungrier for data (Taylor series, Chebyshev + other orthogonal bases for polynomials, neural networks, RNNs, LSTMs, PINNs, <the future>).

You didn't say anything to the contrary, and neither did the original video, but it's very different than what some other people are talking about in this thread ("run an LLM in a loop to do science the way a person does it"). Maybe I'm just ranting at the overloading of the term AI to mean "anything on a GPU".

PontifexCipher··on We Made CUDA Optimization Suck Less
No examples of before/after? Maybe I missed something.
PontifexCipher··on Monster Cables picked the wrong guy to threaten (2008)
What does this add to the conversation?
PontifexCipher··on OpenAI says it has evidence DeepSeek used its model to train competitor
Some info that may be missing:

- v2/v3 (not r1) seem to be cloned from o1/4o output, and perform worse (this cost the oft-repeated 5ish mm USD)

- r1 is specifically a reasoning step (using RL) _on top of_ v2/v3 and performs similarly to o1 (the cost of this is _not reported anywhere_)

- In the o1 blog post, they specifically say they use RL to add reasoning to LLMs: https://openai.com/index/learning-to-reason-with-llms/

PontifexCipher··on SpaceSim
Two months without a commit could still be quite active and useful software, especially for a personal project. Where would you draw the line?