This is a special post for quick takes by Jacob Pfau. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Highly recommend reading Ernest Ryu's twitter multi-thread on proving a long-standing, well-known conjecture with heavy use of ChatGPT Pro. Ernest even includes the chatGPT logs! The convergence of Nesterov gradient descent on convex functions: Part 1, 2, 3.
Ernest gives useful commentary on where/how he found it best to interact with GPT. Incidentally, there's a nice human baseline as well since another group of researchers coincidentally have written up privately a similar result this month!
To add some of my own spin: seems to me time horizons are a nice lens for viewing the collaboration. Ernest, clearly has a long-horizon view of this research problem that helped him (a) know what the most tractable nearby problem was to start on (b) identify when diminishing returns--likelihood of a deadend--were apparent (c) pull out useful ideas from usually flawed GPT work.
The one-week scale of interaction between Ernest and ChatGPT here is a great example of how we're very much in a centaur regime now. We really need to be conceptualizing and measuring AI+human capabilities rather than single-AI capability. It also seems important to be thinking about what safety concerns arise in this regime.
Every time I see a story about an LLM proving an important open conjecture, I think "it's going to turn out that the LLM did not prove an important open conjecture" and so far I have always been somewhat vindicated for one or more of the following reasons:
1: The LLM actually just wrote code to enumerate some cases / improve some bound (!)
2: The (expert) human spent enough time iterating with the LLM that it is not clear the LLM was driving the proof.
3: The result was actually not novel (sometimes the human already knew how to do it and just wanted to test ... (read more)
I can only see the first image you posted. It sounds like there should be a second image (below "This is not happening for his other chats:") but I can't see it.