{"id":365965,"date":"2025-12-24T13:09:21","date_gmt":"2025-12-24T13:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/365965\/"},"modified":"2025-12-24T13:09:21","modified_gmt":"2025-12-24T13:09:21","slug":"how-social-media-encourages-the-worst-of-ai-boosterism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/365965\/","title":{"rendered":"How social media encourages the worst of AI boosterism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Put your math hats on for a minute, and let\u2019s take a look at what this beef from mid-October was about. It\u2019s a perfect example of what\u2019s wrong with AI right now.<\/p>\n<p>Bubeck was excited that GPT-5 seemed to have somehow solved a number of puzzles known as Erd\u0151s problems.<\/p>\n<p>Paul Erd\u0151s, one of the most prolific mathematicians of the 20th century, left behind hundreds of puzzles when he died. To help keep track of which ones have been solved, Thomas Bloom, a mathematician at the University of Manchester, UK, set up<a href=\"https:\/\/www.erdosproblems.com\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"> <\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/erdosproblems.com\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">erdosproblems.com<\/a>, which lists more than 1,100 problems and notes that around 430 of them come with solutions.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>When Bubeck celebrated GPT-5\u2019s breakthrough, Bloom was quick to <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/thomasfbloom\/status\/1979254235075059732\" rel=\"nofollow\">call him out<\/a>. \u201cThis is a dramatic misrepresentation,\u201d he wrote on X. Bloom explained that a problem isn\u2019t necessarily unsolved if this website does not list a solution. That simply means Bloom wasn\u2019t aware of one. There are millions of mathematics papers out there, and nobody has read all of them. But GPT-5 probably has.<\/p>\n<p>It turned out that instead of coming up with new solutions to 10 unsolved problems, GPT-5 had scoured the internet for 10 existing solutions that Bloom hadn\u2019t seen before. Oops!<\/p>\n<p>There are two takeaways here. One is that breathless claims about big breakthroughs shouldn\u2019t be made via social media: Less knee jerk and more gut check.<\/p>\n<p>The second is that GPT-5\u2019s ability to find references to previous work that Bloom wasn\u2019t aware of is also amazing. The hype overshadowed something that should have been pretty cool in itself.<\/p>\n<p>Mathematicians are very interested in using LLMs to trawl through vast numbers of existing results, Fran\u00e7ois Charton, a research scientist who studies the application of LLMs to mathematics at the AI startup Axiom Math, told me when I talked to him about this Erd\u0151s gotcha.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Put your math hats on for a minute, and let\u2019s take a look at what this beef from&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":365966,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-365965","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}