It is not only a matter of the labs having a deep pocket for unlimited tokens, but also deep pockets to build a team of mathematicians and engineers around it for pure marketing purposes.

A lot of those problems probably remained unsolved for so long, because frankly, there's no much money to be made directly out of them. You can't patent a proof.

Thus, progress on each problem was restricted to the efforts of isolated researchers across the world that most of time didn't know each other and that would only communicate through papers and the occasional conference, or maybe a conversation here and there in a forum. But, should any of those problems became a small manhattan project with a team of mathematicians working in the same institution, talking to each other every day, and with unlimited computational resources, I bet a lot of them wouldn't have remain unsolved for so long.

Of course, LLMs can speed up a lot of work, even find unexpected relationships between previously published work that remained overlooked until now, but let's make no mistakes, a lot of this is the result of putting unlimited resources in specifically chosen problems, including professional mathematicians, software engineers building custom harnesses and so on.

In a way it kinds of resemble IBM Deep Blue against Kasparov farse. While nowadays chess engines can beat a grand master, at that time Kasparov was in reality a single human playing against a team of Grandmasters and Engineers assisted by a computer.

Anthropic and OpenAI couldn't care less about the science. This is all very expensive PR and marketing. But until the day they can get a Trump prompting claude something like "Hello super-intelligence, solve erdos problem number XXX to me" and have claude returning a correct proof, no, AI didn't solve anything, it was a computational tool that sped up human work.

TV could have been used to ensure every kid in the world had access to the same educational opportunities a Venture Capitalist or a new yorker banker kid has, or it could be used to massify culture and propaganda. We, as societies choose to have a SEO infested internet.

Nothing that has been made by humanity is final, inevitable. There are people who may want you to think so, but they are lying to you. It is not like the 4th law of Newton was that we had to have continuous economic growth so it makes sense to have compound interest. It is not like weak nuclear force means government will spend more than what their revenues, but that instead of printing money directly to account for that, they need to come up with complicated debt schemes that make sure the one best positioned in financial system can sow what was taken via money devaluation from the poor and the middle class, and then use this extra money to research technologies to put those people out of jobs.

All of those things are political and social choices, neither is the result of a technology per se.

Yeah, either way we're fucked economically with AI: at one side we have a fucking giant bubble crashing, and on the other side we have the mother of all recessions due to the biggest deflationary event ever.

Every fucking decent economist knows that even when he is telling otherwise to keep the porridge coming to his table; but you using AI to say it, it is just fucking bad taste.

I have the distinct impression that MBA and salesman folks think that adequate mathematical terminology is somewhat less "macho", and this impression is re-inforced by the fact that they also love military-adjacent terms and analogies.

Probably the strategy is making as much money as possible while there's demand from the AI labs and then the founder will figure out their next steps with a bit more money in their accounts.

The dopamine hit of having even their most speculative ideas expanded in a convincing paper format is self-reinforcing and soon the affected individual starts believing that the output is perfect and needs no review, because reviewing it would delay the next stimulation cycle.

Raid your own assets, cut costs manically so you can have a few splendid quarters with stock buyback bonanza or focus on long term value creation, which a lot of times involves giving at least a passing tought to other stakeholders such as client and employees?

The getting was great for some time for HP shareholders under Fiorina, or GE shareholders under Welch. Lots of them left the sinking ships at the right moment, but I bet that lot of the others left holding the bag, would have preferred having bought AAPL.

The people in my life who are always throwing parties, have insteresting hobbies like surfing, playing music or rock climbing are basically minimal users of social networking.

Small kids, of course, are a completely different story. But once they go through puberty, parents need to understand that their role in their kids life needs to change a little bit and their kids fucking need their own space with their friends.