My Mental Model of AI Broke on September 8

lolakutty

Are people paid to write this shite?

znnajdla

I think the author is not aware of how much the Millennium Prize proof was actually driven by a human working for years towards that problem. The AI did not solve this on its own. A world class mathematician prompted it towards the proof. In my view, this is still a human achievement, not an AI achievement. If I design a bulldozer to push a five ton rock, did I push the rock or the bulldozer? If the AI really did get the Millennium Prize, then why can't you get a Millennium Prize when you have access to the exact same model in ChatGPT?

nickphx

why should i care about your mental model of anything?

pingou

It took the author until Sept. 8, 2026, to realize LLMs are not just stochastic parrots? I'm glad they did, but I'm not sure that is worthy of the front page. "I remember early systems struggling with something as simple as 2+2. Then, within just a few years, we went from that to systems achieving IMO gold-medal-level performance and now, assuming this proof is correct, to a Millennium Prize problem. That completely changes how I think about the trajectory". How would Sept. 8 completely change how they think about the trajectory? Seems like there has been tremendous progress at all time.

mden

It's hard to say exactly how much credit Astra gets if its training contained the research notes of Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster. Surely it's impressive to generate the result even if working from their notes but it muddies the waters on its capabilities quite a bit. From https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/ : > we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models

EastLondonCoder

For me it was a few years ago. I had seen a twitter comment referencing astrology in a spat with two black female musicians in the US. My preconception was to look up why that kind of superstition was prevalent in those circles. The answer I got from chapgpt was essentially that it has very little to do with superstition and all to do with being able to use a language to talk about stuff while still not move outside cultural norms. More sort of a secret language where you can probe questions like if your boyfriend is violent, or if your friend is having an affair. I think last year I saw some research on how the reading of tea leaves originated in the ottoman empire, it was remarkably similar. The point is that I learned something new that would have been extraordinarily hard to google, or even understand without putting some serious study into the subject.

scotty79

> My belief system was shattered the day the proof was announced. I can't imagine having eyes and being able to hold the wrong belief regarding AI for so long. The fact that AI can surpass humans and make novel contributions to our civilization was obvious for me at least about a year earlier. You need to have pretty messianic view of humans to believe otherwise.

hopelessluca

I guess this post is not worthy of the front page. It is poorly written, repetitive, and feels like it was written by a LLM. It seems more like a reactionary post about events that have already happened. There is no insightful signal whatsoever just a remix of existing rhetoric. Ironically, the blog is also called "Rough Ideas" and the homepage says that the blog may contain rough ideas. I guess Hacker News has declined in quality these days. I might get flagged for saying this.

nelaggy

seems to me that many advancements so far are more the product of intelligent effort than pure brilliance, i'm still hopeful that human researchers (and humans in general) will remain better at asking the right questions and making good decisions

derac

The cognitive bias in humans to believe higher intelligence is unique to humans and even supernatural is very, very strong.

GMoromisato

The problem isn't the mental model of AI--it's the mental model of intelligence. If you think intelligence is some non-algorithmic, non-computable process then of course you won't believe that an AI can be intelligent. But since Turing's time we've known that intelligence is just computation--it's not until recently that we've been able to come up with the specific algorithm. Think back to Kasparov playing Deep Blue. Back then, some people (including Kasparov) believed that a computer would never beat a human. They felt that human creativity and ability to see the whole board would always beat brute-force computation. I watched the pivotal game 5 live. There was a point where Deep Blue made a pawn move away from the main action. The commentators at the time, chess master all, almost cheered--it looked like the machine had blundered. "It's playing like a computer" they said. But one look at Kasparov told you they were wrong. Kasparov was worried. The main action resolved, but in the end, that one pawn move, 20 moves prior, left Deep Blue in a better position. What modern LLMs do is apply brute-force computation to any domain expressible in language--not just a restricted chess domain. That's the algorithm.

tescreal

This, despite the ongoing social litigation of if this is even real? I believe AI is quite capable in the right circumstances, but I'm not convinced "this" is the watershed moment.

keybored

Another convert who can parrot what the detractors said/are saying and that ends with a thoughts-and-prayers socially progressive umm hope this doesn’t exarcerbate hooman differences too much . See you don’t need an LLM to summarize.

erelong

> I had held a very different view of AI: that it was basically a stochastic parrot imo it's been not like that for a few years now (alternatively, stochastic parrots' abilities have been underestimated)

Garlef

I don't know. What's the tl;dr here? "I'm one of the last few who needed convincing, now listen to my thoughts on what's next!"

WarmWash

I'm continually perplexed by people's perception that AI would be incapable of generating new ideas or discoveries, even years ago. Deterministic machines do the same stuff again and again. Add entropy and they do new original stuff. Add a checker or verifier and you can filter for new stuff that is better. At the very least here, you now have evolution. There is nothing that is particularly compelling about a system that can generate new stuff that is an improvement. What's compelling if anything is the verifier, but that isn't particularly any more mysterious than LLM output already. At least not nearly as mysterious as "Meat brains have a magical ability to manifest original ideas".

kittikitti

The number of people I've heard calling AI a "stochastic parrot" is concerning. You don't understand what is or isn't stochastic and you're parroting this phrase. You yourself are a stochastic parrot.

aquafox

> but that an AI system may have produced new mathematical knowledge that humanity did not have before From the expose in Terence Taos blog [1], it seems the difficulty of the Navier-Stokes counter example is a delicate balancing act between having a blow-up solution and a well behaved force field. And this involves a lot of technical arguments based on already existing ideas. If this is true, then the achievement of the AI is rather to correctly navigating this balancing than inventing something completely new. [1] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/07/finite-time-blowup...