Math Vs Machine

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SPEAKER_2 (0:39)

Oh, wait, you're listening.

SPEAKER_3 (0:41)

Okay.

SPEAKER_1 (0:46)

You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab.

SPEAKER_3 (0:49)

From WNYC.

SPEAKER_1 (0:50)

WNYC.

Soren Wheeler (0:56)

This is Radiolab and I am Soren Wheeler.

Steve Strogatz (0:59)

Hey, Soren.

Soren Wheeler (1:00)

Hi. I have to apologize for like dragging you away from Twitter, or I guess I should call it X.

Steve Strogatz (1:06)

And so it begins all this teasing. Okay.

Soren Wheeler (1:10)

Have you been out there? Have you been-

Steve Strogatz (1:12)

It's been really interesting. My addiction is coming back. It's probably like a smoker who stops and then, I shouldn't say that to you. Are you still smoking?

Soren Wheeler (1:20)

I have my dalliance. It's like you, I guess. Sometimes something happens in the world and it draws me back in. So that is Cornell mathematician and longtime friend of the show, Steve Strogatz.

And the reason I had to drag him away from Twitter was because just a couple of days before we talked-

Steve Strogatz (1:37)

It's really been an interesting few days.

Soren Wheeler (1:39)

Open AI announced that they had solved a longstanding big deal math problem.

If I'm honest, I'm not even sure I knew exactly what that meant. But all the mathematicians I was seeing talking online, including Steve, is almost like they were having an existential crisis.

Steve Strogatz (1:57)

It's a big deal. It was a big deal.

Soren Wheeler (1:59)

But why? Like why?

Steve Strogatz (2:00)

Because we're on a trajectory somewhere and it's unclear yet whether it's a happy trajectory or a very sad trajectory. But we're going somewhere.

Soren Wheeler (2:12)

I feel like you have a sad for...

Steve Strogatz (2:15)

You want to know what I think in my heart?

Soren Wheeler (2:16)

Well, I feel like you have a sad... or sure, yes.

Steve Strogatz (2:20)

I'm terrified.

Soren Wheeler (2:23)

Now, Steve wasn't terrified about a lot of things we've all been talking about. I don't know, like a big hack or a crashed economy, computers taking over the world or even really losing his job. Instead, as we talked, it became clear that Steve was reckoning with questions about his own sense of purpose in the world in a way that tried as it might sound, touched on one of the most fundamental things about being a human.

Steve Strogatz (2:53)

So, I think we should just talk about it.

Soren Wheeler (2:55)

Yeah, I mean, however you want to start.

Steve Strogatz (2:57)

Okay. So, I would start the story in November of 2022

Soren Wheeler (3:02)

Okay.

Steve Strogatz (3:03)

That's when ChatGPT made itself known to the world.

Soren Wheeler (3:08)

Did you start using it right off the bat?

Steve Strogatz (3:10)

I did. I used it right away for gags.

You know, write this. At first, it was all about writing. Write a poem in the style of Malcolm Gladwell about some crazy subject. Okay. So, whatever. Then, naturally being a math person, I want to see is it any good at math.

Soren Wheeler (3:27)

Yeah, that's going to sit.

Steve Strogatz (3:28)

It's not trained to do math. It's just supposed to do language. But you could ask it little math problems and it was pretty pathetic. It couldn't do elementary school arithmetic. It would make mistakes. It was easy to fool it. But over the years, it went from being inept at arithmetic to then like it could do algebra kind of clumsily.

Then at some point, it was getting good scores on the International Math Olympiad, which is the test for high school whiz kids.

Soren Wheeler (3:56)

Is this all just number crunching, like what a calculator could do but fast?

Steve Strogatz (4:00)

You could actually solve problems, not just number crunching. No, you could give it logic puzzles. You could give it what looks like a hard math problem for a high school student that involved reasoning.

This is the part that's mysterious, and I'm not even sure it's very well understood by anybody. Somehow, by having read all the books in the Library of Congress and everything on the Internet, everything on the Internet, including blog posts, news articles, somehow the language itself encodes enough logic and reasoning to do math. They hadn't built it to do math, and this is what we would call an emergent property. It emerged without being designed.