Before AI good good enough for people to argue it was a "scam" because it was only taking other people's jobs and not their own*, people were arguing computers were a scam because Shakuntala Devi could find the 23rd root of (*checks notes*):
in just 50 seconds, while the supercomputer she was up against took over a minute.
Of course, this happened in 1977 with a computer that was already obsolete at the time, but stories have a way of sticking.
My 2013 MacBook Air could train a small neural network from scratch on the MNIST database to read handwritten digits, then read all those digits, and then also calculate the 23rd root of that number, all in the (literal, I timed it) blink of an eye.
* why yes, this is a recent thing I've experienced here
Pretty awesome. I fed it to Astra Max and it took over 2 minutes ( https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab1bd98-7974-83e8-9734-8e10b5b3ef... ) so that's interesting in itself. If we knew how she did that, I wonder if the insight would be transferable to transformer-based ANNs.
Interesting character even aside from her mental-arithmetic abilities.
Edit: Deepseek 4.1 Flash running locally got it in 134 seconds. Beaten by Astra but not by much. Neither model seems to recognize the problem (at least it doesn't appear in DS4.1's chain of thought.)
Aye.
Before AI good good enough for people to argue it was a "scam" because it was only taking other people's jobs and not their own*, people were arguing computers were a scam because Shakuntala Devi could find the 23rd root of (*checks notes*):
in just 50 seconds, while the supercomputer she was up against took over a minute.Of course, this happened in 1977 with a computer that was already obsolete at the time, but stories have a way of sticking.
My 2013 MacBook Air could train a small neural network from scratch on the MNIST database to read handwritten digits, then read all those digits, and then also calculate the 23rd root of that number, all in the (literal, I timed it) blink of an eye.
* why yes, this is a recent thing I've experienced here
Pretty awesome. I fed it to Astra Max and it took over 2 minutes ( https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab1bd98-7974-83e8-9734-8e10b5b3ef... ) so that's interesting in itself. If we knew how she did that, I wonder if the insight would be transferable to transformer-based ANNs.
Interesting character even aside from her mental-arithmetic abilities.
Edit: Deepseek 4.1 Flash running locally got it in 134 seconds. Beaten by Astra but not by much. Neither model seems to recognize the problem (at least it doesn't appear in DS4.1's chain of thought.)