FYI, there has been even further progress with Leela odds nets. Here are some recent quotes from GM Larry Kaufman (a.k.a. Hissha) found on the Leela Chess Zero Discord:

(2025-03-04) I completed an analysis of how the Leela odds nets have performed on LiChess since the search-contempt upgrade on Feb. 27. [...] I believe these are reasonable estimates of the LiChess Blitz rating needed to break even with the bots at 5'3" in serious play. Queen and move odds (means Leela plays Black) 2400, Queen odds (Leela White) 2550, [...] Rook and move odds (Leela Black); 3000. Rook odds (Leela White) 3050, knight odds 3200. For comparison only a few top humans exceed 3000, with Magnus at 3131. So based on this, even Magnus would lose a match at 5'3" with knight odds, while perhaps the top five blitz players in the world would win a match at rook odds. Maybe about top fifty could win a match at queen for knight. At queen odds (Leela White), a "par" (FIDE 2400) IM should come out ahead, while a "par" (FIDE 2300) FM should come out behind.

(2025-03-07) Yes, there have to be limits to what is possible, but we keep blowing by what we thought those limits were! A decade ago, blitz games (3'2") were pretty even between the best engine (then Komodo) and "par" GMs at knight odds. Maybe some people imagined that some day we could push that to being even at rook odds, but if anyone had suggested queen odds that would have been taken as a joke. And yet, if we're not there already, we are closing in on it. Similarly at Classical time controls, we could barely give knight odds to players with ratings like FIDE 2100 back then, giving knight odds to "par" GMs in Classical seemed like an impossible goal. Now I think we are already there, and giving rook odds to players in Classical at least seems a realistic goal. What it means is that chess is more complicated than we thought it was.

I have so many mixed feelings about schooling that I'm glad I don't have my own children to worry about. There is enormous potential for improving things, yet so little of that potential gets realized.

The thing about school choice is that funding is largely zero sum. Those with the means to choose better options than public schools take advantage of those means and leave underfunded public schools to serve the least privileged remainder. My public school teacher friends end up with disproportionately large fractions of children with special needs who need extra care and attention but don't have the support to care for them effectively. As a result, all the students and all the teachers suffer. How do we do right by all these individuals? Private schools can largely avoid accommodating these students. The private schools can largely choose their students, but the public schools cannot. It reminds me of insurance companies choosing not to cover certain people, who then have no affordable coverage options. It's not an unsolvable problem in theory, but reality is messy and politically fraught.

I don't think it's accurate to model breakdowns as a linear function of journeys or train-miles unless irregular effects like extreme weather are a negligible fraction of breakdowns.

How does the falling price factor into an investor's decision to enter the market? Should they wait for batteries to get even cheaper, or should they invest immediately and hope the arbitrage rates hold up long enough to provide a good return on investment? The longer the payback period, the more these dynamics matter.

"10x engineers" are a thing, and if we assume they're high-agency people always looking to streamline and improve their workflows, we should expect them to be precisely the people who get a further 10x boost from LLMs.

I highly doubt this. A 10x engineer is likely already bottlenecked by non-coding work that AI can't help with, so even if they 10x their coding, they may not increase overall productivity much.

I’d rather see the prison system less barbaric than try to find ways of intentionally inflicting that level of barbarism in a compressed form.

Regardless, I think you still need confinement of some sort for people who are dangerous but not deserving of the death penalty.

Yeah, my general assumption in these situations is that the article is likely overstating things for a headline and reality is not so clear cut. Skepticism is definitely warranted.

As far as I understand from the article, the LLM generated five hypotheses that make sense. One of them is the one that the team has already verified but hadn’t yet published anywhere and another one the team hadn’t even thought of but consider worth investigating.

Assuming the five are a representative sample rather than a small human-curated set of many more hypotheses, I think that’s pretty impressive.

if the LLM generates enough hypotheses, and you already know the answer, one of them is likely to sound like the answer.

I don’t think this is true in general. Take any problem that is difficult to solve but easy to verify and you aren’t likely to have an LLM guess the answer.

I’d want something much stronger than eyewitness testimony. It’s much too unreliable for killing people without other forms of evidence corroborating it.