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Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
231–240 of 366 posts
Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#232Earlier 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.
> If you think 'most people are completely put off by AI slop', you're living in a blessed bubble
I think most knowledge workers don’t like AI because most of them are aware that AI was created to replace them.
Just about every CEO that has given a speech about AI at universities have gotten booed by the students which isn’t surprising as those CEOs are effectively promoting technology that will take their future from them.
Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#233One 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…
Yeah, among other factors, that "figure it out" mentality put me off in the end. Especially because often you need to show the same mentality unless you want to overkill proofs and spend more time on them than assigned to you. I sometimes miscalibrated and pointed out some details that didn't need pointing out in my proofs while in other proofs, I skipped over too many details for the TA.
Of course I agree that if the student just asks LLM to do their homework, they have not learned anything. But it's sad if one can't ask questions about a proof or such. Having the LLM around to review the homework submission is also useful, to make sure that the arguments are solid.
Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
> AI (in this form) will never be able to solve things we truly cannot solve yet. Argument?
The strongest argument for this is structural: what LLMs are. In a brutal simplistic way: each token is represented in a high dimensional vector. LLMs operate on them. They are the true, underlying meaning of the token for the LLM. Think of it as 1000+ ways to think of that word/token. Those meanings are baked in at training time. So, LLMs might be able to cross-reference them and solve a class of problems that flew…
> but can't come up with revolutionary theories that were never in the training set.
Can you elaborate? I don't think the solution to the unit distance problem was in the training set, but I'm guessing you mean there's some higher bar for revolutionary theories LLMs cant reach? If so where do you expect the limit will be?
Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#235For 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.
You are describing the Jagged Frontier. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2023-10/SSRN-id...
Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
The strongest argument for this is structural: what LLMs are. In a brutal simplistic way: each token is represented in a high dimensional vector. LLMs operate on them. They are the true, underlying meaning of the token for the LLM. Think of it as 1000+ ways to think of that word/token. Those meanings are baked in at training time. So, LLMs might be able to cross-reference them and solve a class of problems that flew…
Instead of going into a long technical argument of why your description of LLMs is flawed, I'll go straight to the point, because people keep moving the goal posts. What exact problem would need to be solved by LLMs to convince you that they DO discover novel solutions?
unify general relativity with quantum mechanics. The continuum hypothesis. The traveling salesman problem in polynomial time.
Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This feels like a troll comment, but I'll bite.
Mathematics requires substantial creativity at every level. There is problem selection, conjecture formation, proof strategies, definitions, models, and explanations. Yes, it's constrained and guided by logic and rigor but having logic won't give you creativity.
> Music is a human endeavor and musical recordings hurt musicians, bands, orchestras, etc. Especially those starting out.
The medium it is recorded on has no bearing on what composed the music. If people don't get rewarded for composing they won't. Same with mathematics. If people don't get paid for being creative they just won't be creative.
I am not saying I agree with everything in the article. OP of this thread just made a low effort comment that was addressed in lengths during the article.
Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the solution. If the solution is that P≠NP, the concept of NP-completeness remains the bigger contribution, unless the proof techniques are particularly interesting and lead to other major results. The same applies if P=NP but the proof does not ultimately lead to a practical algorithm. If we get a practical algorithm, the answer is more valuable than the question.
Do questions like goldbach conjecture, fermats last theorem, etc deserve more credit than whoever answers them?
Fermat's last theorem probably doesn't. While attempts to solve it have led to many mathematical discoveries, the theorem itself feels little more than a piece of trivia. I'm less familiar with the implications of the Goldbach conjecture.
In contrast, class NP and NP-completeness quickly became central concepts in theoretical computer science.
Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>mathematics is a human-endevor Just like numbers and logic, it isn't and never was reserved only for humans. They need to adapt.
Idk man creativity is something pretty human. insufferable people are very fine if, for example, music & art is outsourced to AI so they can make a some $$. But those things are meant to be enjoyed, not consumed.
Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it doesn’t sound like you get it. It has nothing to do with the properties of LLMs and everything to do with the complexity of mathematics. Have you ever been exposed to concepts that are so complex that you feel like you could devote your entire lifetime to trying to understand it and still fall short? It’s a very humbling experience, especially if you have classmates who pick it up effortlessly. Without a human…
> Have you ever been exposed to concepts that are so complex that you feel like you could devote your entire lifetime to trying to understand it and still fall short? It’s a very humbling experience, especially if you have classmates who pick it up effortlessly. I'm really interested in this anecdote. I have never experienced this but have a reasonable academic background (BSc, MSc, MD) - and I am certainly not the p…
For myself it was learning what a limit is in calculus, then learning about vector spaces, then learning about metric spaces and then learning about different topological spaces.
Then I had to relearn how a limit worked.
From a proof with epsilon delta inequalities. To a proof with showing for some n dimensional metric spaces that has all the properties needed to converge does in-fact converge. Finally to a proof that for any space that is metric there is an isometric function into that metric space that also converges.
And that does touch measure theory, functional analysis or set theory. So there’s still so so much more for me to learn.