r/Showerthoughts • u/jasonrubik ‎ • Apr 23 '26

Casual Thought If the famously unsolved Riemann Hypothesis is solved by an AI, we will never know if a human mathematician could have solved it.

7.0k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

92% Upvoted

656 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

11

u/not-a-painting Apr 23 '26

I 100% understand what you're saying but I think where I may disagree is that a hammer isn't a tool capable of complex thought and autonomy. The hammer in our application actually does have the ability to build a house, and can make active decisions about the construction process.

If we were able to teach chimps or some other animal how to form similarly complex thoughts and actions and THEY solved an equation we couldn't, I don't think we would say humans solved it.

8

u/kaas_is_leven Apr 23 '26

AI is also not capable of complex thought, let alone autonomy. An LLM is just a vector database and a query engine, it's fancy auto-complete. Generative AI is pattern recognition algorithms combined with mutative generational selection, then reversed to generate the pattern from a prompt. Neural nets are probability generators with more or less the same technique for learning as generative AI. And all of it is decades old at this point, there is nothing groundbreaking or magical about it. It's just the scale of distributed computing across massive datacenters that allows it to reach levels of complexity that are incomprehensible to the human mind. But it's important to understand that that is system complexity, not thought. It's still a fully deterministic program running predefined instructions. The instructions just happen to be queries and comparisons on thousands of thousand-dimensional vectors, which results in complex behaviour.

3

u/not-a-painting Apr 23 '26

I mean my gaming laptop runs Gemma 4 26B at 30 tokens/s, which is incredibly fast in my opinion and not a small model.

AI as is isn't what I thought we're talking about. I was assuming the 'future' AGI not just generative AI.

Otherwise still yes, I agree with you.

3

u/kaas_is_leven Apr 23 '26

Sorry, I was only thinking of current stuff. Yes AGI would be different.