Earlier quoted context omitted.
Collaborative environment meaning that any PFY employed by the "AI" providers can read your most intimate thought processes and keep track of embarrassing failures or misconceptions.
The embarrassing failures or misconceptions of math experts with regards to research level mathematics? Definitely a serious problem. Though by your "Perelman and Wiles didn't need "AI" assistance" comment, you'd surely be there on the sidelines to ridicule them for each and every single one. I guess maybe that's where your concerns are coming from? I can practically see how these concerns of yours would suddenly eva…
Terence Tao: At the Erdos problem website, AI assistance now becoming routine
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Re: Terence Tao: At the Erdos problem website, AI assistance now becoming routine
#22Re: Terence Tao: At the Erdos problem website, AI assistance now becoming routine
#23Also interesting that the responses include anti-Lean material.
I'm not a mathematician, but how credible is that anti-Lean material? Are they marketing an alternative programmatic approach, as in they're anti-lean because "I got something else" or are they philosophically anti-Lean and have valid arguments?
Re: Terence Tao: At the Erdos problem website, AI assistance now becoming routine
#24I was told by a hungarian, that hungarian written spelling and spoken pronunciation is pretty precisely aligned compared to, say, english. Except when it comes to names when it gets a bit random!
Why not do the bloke the decency to spell his name correctly? Those diacritics are important.
Anyway, I was told that Paul's name is very roughly pronounced by an anglophone as: "airdish".
Re: Terence Tao: At the Erdos problem website, AI assistance now becoming routine
#25Also interesting that the responses include anti-Lean material.
I'm not a mathematician, but how credible is that anti-Lean material? Are they marketing an alternative programmatic approach, as in they're anti-lean because "I got something else" or are they philosophically anti-Lean and have valid arguments?
It's not very credible. There are individual fragments that make sense but it's not consistent when taken together.
For example, by making reference to Godelian problems and his overall mistrust of infinitary structures, he's implicitly endorsing ultrafinitism (not just finitism because e.g. PRA which is the usual theory for finitary proofs also falls prey to Godel's incompleteness theorems). But this is inconsistent with his expressed support for CASes, which very happily manipulate structures that are meant to be infinitary.
He tries to justify this on the grounds that CASes only perform a finite number of symbol manipulations to arrive at an answer, but so too is true for Lean, otherwise typechecking would never terminate. Indeed this is true of any formal system you could run on a computer.
Leaving aside his inconsistent set of arguments for CAS over Lean (and there isn't really a strong distinction between the two honestly; you could argue that Lean and other dependently types proof assistants are just another kind of CAS), his implicit support of ultrafinitism already would require a huge amount of work to make applicable to a computer system. There isn't a consensus on the logical foundations of ultrafinitism yet so building out a proof checker that satisfies ultrafinitistic demands isn't even really well-defined and requires a huge amount of theory crafting.
And just for clarity, finitism is the notion that unboundedness is okay but actual infinities are suspect. E.g. it's okay to say "there are an infinite number of natural numbers" which is understood to be shorthand for "there is no bound on natural numbers" but it's not okay to treat the infinitary object N of all natural numbers as a real thing. So e.g. some finitists are okay with PA over PRA.
On the other hand ultrafinitists deny unboundedness and say that sufficiently large natural numbers simply do not exist (most commonly the operationalization of this is that the question of whether a number exists or not is a matter of computation that scales with the size of the number, if the computation has not completed we cannot have confidence the number exists, and hence sufficiently large numbers for which the relevant computations have not been completed do not exist). This means e.g. quantification or statements of the form "for all natural numbers..." are very dangerous and there's not a complete consensus yet on the correct formalization of this from an ultrafinitistic point of view (or whether such statements would ever be considered coherent).
Re: Terence Tao: At the Erdos problem website, AI assistance now becoming routine
#26They should name one of the AI's "Erdos". Then we can all have an Erdos number of one!
Re: Terence Tao: At the Erdos problem website, AI assistance now becoming routine
#27Having the ability to throw math heavy ML papers at the assistants and get simplified explanations / pseudocode back is absolutely amazing, as someone who's forgot most of what I learned in uni, 25+ years back and never really used it since.
Especially for fields that I didn’t study at the Bachelors or Masters level, like biology. Getting to engage with deeper research with a knowledgeable tutor assistant has enabled me to go deeper than I otherwise could.
Re: Terence Tao: At the Erdos problem website, AI assistance now becoming routine
#28Erdős I was told by a hungarian, that hungarian written spelling and spoken pronunciation is pretty precisely aligned compared to, say, english. Except when it comes to names when it gets a bit random! Why not do the bloke the decency to spell his name correctly? Those diacritics are important. Anyway, I was told that Paul's name is very roughly pronounced by an anglophone as: "airdish".
Re: Terence Tao: At the Erdos problem website, AI assistance now becoming routine
#29Erdős I was told by a hungarian, that hungarian written spelling and spoken pronunciation is pretty precisely aligned compared to, say, english. Except when it comes to names when it gets a bit random! Why not do the bloke the decency to spell his name correctly? Those diacritics are important. Anyway, I was told that Paul's name is very roughly pronounced by an anglophone as: "airdish".
A theorem both deep and profound States that every circle is round But in a paper by Erdos Written in Kurdish A counterexample is found
Re: Terence Tao: At the Erdos problem website, AI assistance now becoming routine
#30[flagged]
Because he is smart enough to use the existing (frontier) tools to get good results and create a sort of collaborative environment that is novel for research maths.