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Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

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Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#191

Post by fc417fc802 »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #169
brador wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are on tiny 1-5T parameter models with local power stations. We can reach Q models just by throwing resources at it. That’s a million times current B models.

You cannot think fast enough when your wires are kilometers long. The only way up is in, and silicon transistors just cannot compete with density with biologic brains, ergo, super intelligence is a pipe dream

Baseless assertions. Fab tech continues to improve. There's no reason ML model internals have to be strictly serial - in fact we're already seeing some shifts away from that.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#192

Post by nyxtom »

For every interesting problem AI solves there are a long tail of really dumb things that AI performs that humans would never do. Some days I am in awe of one-shot magic eight-ball output and other days I'm so frustrated by the sheer stupidity of what it produces. It remains to be seen whether that long tail of stupidity can ever be resolved in the current form of LLMs.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#193

Post by math_dandy »

yieldcrv wrote: post #63
turzmo wrote: post #48

Much of math (or science) research has the strange quality of being mostly curiosity-driven, but having giant benefits that occasionally spin out to the public. Some questions are more urgent and practical. My feeling is that the more directly practical a question is, the more likely the research community is to support AI usage in that question. The annoying thing about recent AI advances is that they target questio…

That's an interesting perspective and I wholly disagree with the conclusion You are saying that tough problems with no applicability are useful because people that you happen to respect got good by their curiosity and pursuit of trying to solve these kinds of problems and failing, but branching off into other cognitive areas as mathematicians Now if I know anything about math for the sake of math, and academics, thes…

> Now if I know anything about math for the sake of math, and academics, these are the same people that lament the idea of intelligent people going to the finance sector or any other trade they just happen not to respect as much

IME a vastly more common sentiment among mathematicians regarding mathematical talent leaving the nest to apply their skills in other fields is that those other fields are lucky to get them!

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#194

Post by martin1975 »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #165
martin1975 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading this invoked the image of ouroboros in my mind.

The Ouroboros in western mythology is a cautionary tale about the uselessness of the first perfect immortal being, and why humans should suffer our imperfections with insightful grace. The concept also made a great Red Dwarf episode. LLM are more like the Mechanical Turk trick, but the persons inside the machine running the con is unaware of how their actions affect the confounded observers. Have a wonderful day =3

Thank you, human being! Have you looked at the price of a RTX 5090? I can get a used car for that.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#195

Post by par1970 »

rad_val wrote: post #190
Spacecosmonaut wrote: post #24

Accelerationists may argue that the eroding of proper attribution and proof verification by humans is a meaningless short term struggle of a dying field. Mathematics seems to be entering an era where human + machine maximizes performance, much like chess in the 1990s. However, imagine a future where even talented mathematicians are nothing but noise in the machine (as is the case in chess now). A future where AI gene…

AI (in this form) will never be able to solve things we truly cannot solve yet. It might catch things that we didn't project properly or brute force things no human can , but it will never unify general relativity with quantum mechanics. It's amazing at finding hidden truths in large datasets, but won't win a Nobel unassisted.

> AI (in this form) will never be able to solve things we truly cannot solve yet.

Argument?

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#196

Post by gnerd00 »

andy99 wrote: post #187
Huntsecker wrote: post #163

Anyone else draw similarities with this and the artists and authors who complained when gen ai first came out. I think a lot of people don't realise the disruption ai will cause to many industries, until its directly impacting them, basically personal fable at scale ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_fable ).

I’m curious, do writers and authors still really care about AI? I think by now most people are completely put off by AI slop, the value of AI writing or image generation is basically zero So I suspect that the cloud will pass on math too, initial demos get extrapolated and people get worried but in the end slop is slop and serious people aren’t getting replaced or even threatened.

> do writers and authors still really care about AI

it is demographics.. there is no single answer, you are talking about millions of people with varying amounts of this JOB description

> most people are completely put off by AI slop

this is almost pathological.. most people consume media not produce it. Those in the business of media have been eliminating people for thirty years, and this AI tooling has multiplied that effect

> the value of XXXX writing or image generation generation is basically zero

yes - bingo.. the average capable person now can expect to be paid ZERO for their ability to personally produce writing or image generation.. and, if you don't start somewhere, you will never get to ascend the ladder of success in those fields, by definition

> I suspect that the cloud will pass on math too

consistent with the other statements here, this is 180 degrees false.. substantiation? the content of the letter signed by world class mathematicians, who are visibly quite concerned

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#197

Post by fc417fc802 »

tz18 wrote: post #182
est31 wrote: post #174

One of the reasons why over a decade ago, I dived deeply into the OSS world instead of mathematics was that it was so much more accessible: there were docs for everything, and I got direct feedback when something worked vs when something didn't work. Most of my questions had answers on stack overflow, and once I joined Rust (which back then in 2015 didn't have a big stackoverflow presence) I had a community who answe…

>AI makes the math world more accessible than before. If you have a question about a proof in the lecture, you can just ask it. I think that is great, really! but does anyone remember asking a TA or teacher or prof or parent and getting told you can work it out for yourself, or maybe just given a hint? What if that is an essential part of learning, having to work through things you don't understand, but that you have…

You will have to learn to voluntarily figure things out for yourself without being pushed towards that. In a sense it's analogous to the presence of cheap calorie dense foods. In order to not be overweight you have to be mindful of and regulate your food intake in various ways.

Alternatively, perhaps universities will provide access to fine tuned models that are mindful of such things.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#198

Post by IcyWindows »

QuantumNoodle wrote: post #137
1970-01-01 wrote: post #135

Why is it wrong to expect humans (mathematicians) to adapt here? AI is already producing solutions to problems that humans could not find. Culture holds value until it does not.

Sorry did you read the article or just the headline? The theme is mathematics is a human-endevor and automation undermines that, particularly the ones starting out. It risks killing the culture entirely. Some other key points: - AI-generated papers could overwhelm peer-review systems with low-quality work. - It may become difficult to assign proper credit for discoveries. - Researchers who choose not to use AI tools…

I don't see how this is different than things replaced decades ago:

Music is a human endeavor and musical recordings hurt musicians, bands, orchestras, etc. Especially those starting out.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#199

Post by fc417fc802 »

par1970 wrote: post #195
rad_val wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI (in this form) will never be able to solve things we truly cannot solve yet. It might catch things that we didn't project properly or brute force things no human can , but it will never unify general relativity with quantum mechanics. It's amazing at finding hidden truths in large datasets, but won't win a Nobel unassisted.

> AI (in this form) will never be able to solve things we truly cannot solve yet. Argument?

We have yet to see evidence of proper generalization AFAIK. Examples such as this proof are the closest I'm aware of. I haven't read this one in detail yet but the other examples I've seen have been (upon examination) much closer to an (absurdly) deep literature search than to novel thought.

Obviously that doesn't mean we won't eventually achieve novel thought, or even that the current form is fundamentally incapable of it, merely that we've yet to see evidence of it and thus the default assumption is that we aren't there yet.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#200

Post by pj_mukh »

Sebguer wrote: post #189
andy99 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious, do writers and authors still really care about AI? I think by now most people are completely put off by AI slop, the value of AI writing or image generation is basically zero So I suspect that the cloud will pass on math too, initial demos get extrapolated and people get worried but in the end slop is slop and serious people aren’t getting replaced or even threatened.

This is quite a way to admit that you don't have any writers or artists in your social group. It has absolutely gutted jobs in these industries, and will continue to do so. If you think 'most people are completely put off by AI slop', you're living in a blessed bubble because: most people cannot even tell that the slop is slop, and are happy to engorge themselves on it.

Ehh, I've had the opposite experience, with lots of writers and artists in my circle.

The markets that have replaced writers and artists with slop never valued them in the first place, and the markets that do will never replace them with AI, and I say this as an AI engineer.

Writing movies, writing theater, creating clearly original illustrations for various purposes, these are all tasks AI will never threaten, because there is just no point. And also, the market sizes for this kind of thing are a rounding error compared to say coding or back office automation which is incidentally the bulk of the token spend right now, confirming all this.

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