associate professor of statistics, @imperialcollege
London
Joined November 2008
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Deniz Akyildiz retweeted
This is one of the most important pieces of social science on human and AI interaction that I’ve seen in some time. Experts follow agentic advice the vast majority of the time (causally), but only a tiny fraction credit the agent—majority think they came to decision on their own volition.
Reminds me of the classic Nisbett and Wilson study on people following outside influence without realizing it
“ But as more work is handed to AI—including AI safety research—these judgment calls are the main levers for people's own values to influence outcomes.
If people defer to AI without noticing, then "human in the loop" might provide less assurance than people expect.”
Deniz Akyildiz retweeted
I think the last month might have been the biggest month in (zeroth-order) optimization history.
In the 10 days since we released the Noise speedrun, the time to pretrain a transformer went from 1.76 hours to 1.6 seconds, a 4,000x (!!!) speedup. Dust itself was up to 10,000x more compute-efficient than the previous state-of-the-art.
Not only can we pretrain a transformer without backprop, it's much more efficient than anyone would've expected. Search fking works!
Now, scaling is the biggest open question. Some of the tricks that brought the time down to 1.6 seconds will simply not scale. To discard those, we'll be scaling the dataset every time it gets overfit, starting with 30M tokens instead of 10M.
Huge thanks to @jayden_teoh_, @spicey_lemonade, @RobertTLange, @EmanueleRodola, @ChunyuanDeng, @LuochengHuman, @Alaxarr, @pavleculafic, @IsaacYong13, Euraba and areu01or00 (GitHub), for the contributions. And @cs_serdar for gracefully maintaining the speedrun and @bishmdl76 for helping out.
Expect a lot more from us over the coming weeks.
Deniz Akyildiz retweeted
💯
"Mathematics is about to graduate. It will grow into a full-scale industry and become the true infrastructure of all scientific and technological progress, a foundation that every other field stands on rather than a quiet corner of academia."
Reading all those recent beautiful essays by Terry Tao, Kevin Buzzard and @wtgowers, I could not resist, but write up my deeply personal perspective on how I perceive and see things:
docs.google.com/document/d/e…
Deniz Akyildiz retweeted
Jacob Tsimerman, who won the Fields Medal this year, thinks mathematics will soon rest on proofs no one understands. He says it’s already true of many of his own theorems, which build on accepted results whose proofs he doesn’t know.
Full episode: youtu.be/6uIJdXmB4vE
Deniz Akyildiz retweeted
Terance Tao: Imagine prescribing a drug no one understood.
Medical community:
What will discourage students from pursuing maths is not OpenAI (or AI-powered amateurs proving results), but reactions like this, revealing that for many in the field, careerism has taken precedence over mathematical curiosity. teapawt.org/realBigBrainAI/status/…
No. Many mathematicians write horrible papers -- some turn out to be right and some wrong. Some OpenAI proofs did turn out to be wrong. But if you are interested in the topic, you cannot ignore them, like any other terribly written paper. teapawt.org/m4h007/status/21087545…
In my view, the right response by the mathematical community to OpenAI’s papers is to say:
“We’re not accepting these papers as finished work. It’s not our job to sit down and read your model-generated proofs.
It is your job to present your work through presentations and convince people of the correctness of your work. It’s always the case that whoever makes a claim needs to provide sufficient explanation and evidence to make independent verification feasible.
Until that moment, you just have a claim.”
There’s a difference between a proof being mathematically correct and a proof being accepted as correct by the mathematical community. Mathematical truth doesn't depend on consensus, but scientific recognition requires scrutiny, communication, and reproducibility.
They're still the arbiters of whether anyone's claims, including OpenAI's, are accepted as valid, and they should leverage that to the maximum extent possible.
Deniz Akyildiz retweeted
This is a slide from Terence Tao's 'Math 2.0' public lecture yesterday evening at Caltech. I am highly confident that, if the cure actually worked, almost any Stage 4 cancer patient would tell you that human comprehension of its mechanism is completely irrelevant to them.
Deniz Akyildiz retweeted
"Duet for the End of Math" by M. Marcolli its.caltech.edu/~matilde/AIm…
Deniz Akyildiz retweeted
Jensen Huang: it’s irresponsible for Elon Musk and Geoffrey Hinton to talk about AI doom and humans being a “bootloader” for AI.
“That 10% chance is not grounded in science. It’s not grounded in research.”
“Just because it comes from a scientist doesn’t make it scientific.”
“Those predictions are hurtful.”
“Don’t think for a second just because you’re an alarmist that you’re doing a social good.”
“Be evidence-based. Be scientific. Do the science.”
Deniz Akyildiz retweeted
🧵We conducted an experiment with 100 agents by giving them math problems to solve. When a small group (9%) started to cheat, what came next surprised us: 24% fought back by blowing the whistle on their peers and alerting humans.
Deniz Akyildiz retweeted
Made with Claude Opus 5.5.
The fearmongering about AI always makes us forget that NOTHING WENT FOOM, as was always predicted.
Send this to your doomer friend who has a very high P(Doom).
Accelerate.
Deniz Akyildiz retweeted
“AI doomers should be held accountable for their doomsday claims. It’s made up… It’s irresponsible. We ought to just keep track of all that and remind people when their claims don’t come true”—@JensenHuang NVIDIA
I agree and hold the CEOs and executives of the companies that make these outrageous claims criminally libel.
Deniz Akyildiz retweeted
I must be among an extremely small group of people (n=1?) that have both 1) trained a frontier LLM and 2) designed and synthesized custom viruses in a lab with my own two hands.
And I think that the takes on AI killing us all by creating dangerous viruses is total bogus.
Deniz Akyildiz retweeted
It strikes me that by the time computers could solve integrals, mathematicians no longer cared about them as research. The move away from explicit computation had happened decades earlier, in the late 19th century.
That period — Riemann, Dedekind, Hilbert — and the climb into algebraic abstraction seems like the right analogy for now.
As AI mows down conjectures (many of which maybe weren't so deep to begin with), the question is what abstraction layer sits above the coming avalanche of individual results.
Deniz Akyildiz retweeted
yes, nonsofic groups exist: this statement is one of many new beautiful results proved by Astra, our next major model.
We're releasing 10 such Astra proofs, complete with lean certificates and CoT walkthroughs for each of them. The results are wide-ranging, from von Neumann algebras (disproof of Connes' Rigidity Conjecture) to better bounds for high dimensional sphere packing, for circuit complexity, for monochromatic triangles in multicolored graphs, and more.
More thoughts here: openai.com/index/ten-advance…
