Gregory Gromov

The idea of the intellectual immortality of generations is knocking at the door of the next stage of the AI revolution. To give a first impression of what we are talking about, let me recall a counter-intuitive statistic on road safety by age groups: the safest drivers, by far, are seventy-year-olds. In other words, it takes people roughly half a century to truly learn how to drive safely. And then, all too soon, they pass away — with no opportunity to share that hard-won skill … not even with their own grandchildren, who must begin learning from scratch and often pay the ultimate price for their mistakes. This is not a unique situation. In fact, it is emblematic of a deeper human condition. All verbalized knowledge amounts to only a thin, transparent surface layer floating on the vast ocean of human knowledge & skills. That ocean is formed by a lifetime of accumulated experience, most of which remains inaccessible to others … felt only by the individual, stored in tactile, muscular, motor, and emotional memory rather than in any kind of sharable words. As for knowledge formalized in computers and other automated systems — that is merely a thin film on the surface of this immense ocean. Keeping all of the above in mind, I coined the term AUTOFORMALIZATION and described its meaning in an article: “Autoformalisation - Knowledge & skill acquisition” netvalley.com/cgi-bin/librar… From my more recent experience, I see that today’s most popular AI products — LLM services such as GPT — hold the potential to become effective tools for helping people extract their intuitive knowledge: first by verbalizing it, and then by autoformalizing it. Some people have asked me why I coined the term AUTOFORMALIZATION at a time when there were no tools capable of scaling the process it describes. My usual answer is a quotation from Heinrich Neuhaus book: “The Art of Piano playing” ‘To give a thing a name is the beginning of understanding it’

Nobody could be further removed from “engineering intuition” than a Stanford professor of applied physics —especially when playing with thought experiments. Engineers at SpaceX—and now NVIDIA as well—are working hard to solve what they regard as an exceptionally difficult engineering problem. Solving it would violate no laws of physics—as is the case with practically every problem professional engineers tackle. And then along comes a Stanford professor, saying, in effect: “Take it easy. I’ve done a thought experiment.” @ElonMusk @SawyerMerritt @SpaceX

The paper netvalley.com/library/autofo… was written during the early personal-computing boom, when it seemed that human–machine collaboration across every domain of creative endeavor was just around the corner. It grew out of my decade of engineering research and development devoted to automating biological experiments. But it turned out to be a long way to Tipperary. Even Ilya Sutskever’s arrival in the world in 1986, the year the paper appeared—surely no coincidence!—was not enough. Several more chapters of technological history still had to unfold. At CERN, the World Wide Web had to be created netvalley.com/cgi-bin/intval… Later, Ilya Sutskever, Alex Krizhevsky, and Geoffrey Hinton would produce the landmark AlexNet paper, signaling that an AI revolution was approaching. Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, and their fellow founders would then establish OpenAI. Only after that long journey did the GPT moment announce to the world that the means to bring AUTOFORMALIZATION to scale were finally here. The human–machine synergy envisioned in the personal-computing era was becoming accessible through everyday dialogue. The process was underway:

“Pure truth will surely triumph— if it does what vile lies do.” Lest anyone suspect these lines were inspired by the final days before the midterms, let me remind you once again: the Russian poet Vladimir Vysotsky wrote them nearly half a century ago.

The synergistic effect of AUTOFORMALIZATION nitter.gq/ntvll/status/196382835… — a term I coined in 1984 and elaborated on in 1986. Nearly forty years later — 1984/2023 — the GPT moment began bringing this human–machine synergy to scale. UDC 681.322.1-181.4+681.338.5 Grom ov G. R. «Autoformalization»: Knowledge ac- quisition of professional skills.- Microprocessor Devices and Systems, 1986, N 3, p. 80. The paper discusses the process of the development of the "knowledge industry". 'A brief analysis of the main historical stages of the evolution of the information technology is given. The specifics of the knowledge acquisition and representation processes in personal processes computing is discussed. It is shown that knowledge representation becomes the main form of the integration of new units of individual professional skills into the active body of the scientific knowledge.

5 weeks old

“but we attacked the frigate board by board’

Некий чудак и поныне за Правду воюет, - правда, в речах его правды - на ломаный грош: «Чистая Правда со временем восторжествует, если проделает то же, что явная Ложь!» - Владимир Высоцкий A certain crank tried to vindicate Truth - he’s still trying. True, there’s no truth in his speeches - they’re cunning and sly: "Time will come, brothers, when Truth will be certain to triumph - Always provided it acts in the same way as Lie."

А мы с фрегатом становились борт о борт — еще не вечер, еще не вечер. youtube.com/watch?app=deskto…

“OpenAI…have made 3 new major scientific discoveries in mathematics, computer science, & physics.” Small correction but huge difference: not physics, but theoretical physics In other words, since Greg began to win Erdos race openAI continues to burn money by competing with prominent professors & faculties in three math domains: the math, applied math / computer science, and math in physics / theoretical physics

Grok sometimes demonstrates superhuman wisdom: