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Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

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Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#241

Post by [deleted] »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #236
meken wrote: post #213

I don’t see why it makes a meaningful difference if a human solves a math problem versus AI - it seems like the same amount of understanding will come out in the end. Either the understanding will come from humans arriving at the proof in the former case, or the understanding will come from humans understanding the proof that the AI came up with in the latter.

Because the problem has almost no value unto itself. The clay statement of navier stokes is not relevant to how CFD is done in practice. It's about what is non verifiable versus verifiable. The same way it produces "slop" code (which, if you give it test cases, will be 100% correct), it also produces "slop" math. Code that serves a business function, it's ok if its slop. Math that serves directly a business function…

[deleted]

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#242

Post by ironman1478 »

orangecat wrote: post #182
_alternator_ wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. GP was referring to the use of copyrighted material to train LLMs.

Which is not "theft" according to current legal precedent, and also common sense.

It is theft under common sense.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#243

Post by majormajor »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #131
20k wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the literal opposite of progress: stealing from people genuinely creating, and stealing the money they should earn

Funny, the stuff that was stolen is still there. A strange kind of theft. Copyright maximalism is a bad look on a site called "Hacker News." Perhaps other sites beckon.

> Copyright maximalism is a bad look on a site called "Hacker News." Perhaps other sites beckon.

Frankly it's more of an insult to the "hacker" name to be apologising for big companies profiting off of frontrunning existing work for PR purposes, if the claims about piggybacking on human-directed efforts/prompting are true.

Being pro-copyright in order to protect the work of an individual from being reconstituted into the corporate machine is VERY hackery. Novel use for an existing tool, to fight the dominant system.

(Of course, we're on a so-called "hacker" site hosted by a company run by squarely-establishment individuals acting in an extremely un-hackery-field (investing), so the irony here has been at least one layer deep since the start.)

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#244

Post by adastra22 »

wrsh07 wrote: post #168
gre wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we asked AI to create new interesting math problems? XD

Yes, many mathematicians have. As Tao points out, merely suggesting new open questions isn't really sufficient. Part of what gives these problems their fame is their notoriety, their difficulty, the fact that many prodigious mathematicians have spent an evening or week or month or several years studying it. It wouldn't be as interesting if it had just been solved by the fifth random mathematician who considered it No…

Mathematics isn't art. It doesn't gain its value in human affairs from being interesting to study. I fail to see why we should cater to that.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#245

Post by unified101 »

wrsh07 wrote: post #168
gre wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we asked AI to create new interesting math problems? XD

Yes, many mathematicians have. As Tao points out, merely suggesting new open questions isn't really sufficient. Part of what gives these problems their fame is their notoriety, their difficulty, the fact that many prodigious mathematicians have spent an evening or week or month or several years studying it. It wouldn't be as interesting if it had just been solved by the fifth random mathematician who considered it No…

Have we asked it new interesting math problems, after studing some space for an evening or a day?

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#246

Post by BeetleB »

adastra22 wrote: post #244
wrsh07 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, many mathematicians have. As Tao points out, merely suggesting new open questions isn't really sufficient. Part of what gives these problems their fame is their notoriety, their difficulty, the fact that many prodigious mathematicians have spent an evening or week or month or several years studying it. It wouldn't be as interesting if it had just been solved by the fifth random mathematician who considered it No…

Mathematics isn't art. It doesn't gain its value in human affairs from being interesting to study. I fail to see why we should cater to that.

What is it, if not an art?

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#247

Post by tmp10423288442 »

bee_rider wrote: post #142
nilkn wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to come up with new open problems. It's hard to come up with new open problems that seem to teach us something fundamentally new about the world. Our current batch of problems went through a complex selection process over decades (or centuries) based not purely on difficulty but also on perceived insightfulness. I studied math, but I am not a mathematician, so I think I have a slightly different perspective…

I haven’t been following the AI proof stuff very closely, but the impression I got was that these models are producing massive Lean programs that prove the statement one way or another, but are quite difficult to fully understand. Actually, I have to admit I don’t really know what math is. With physics we suspect there’s a universe, and when we study physics we’re improving our description of the behavior of that uni…

The models produce both Lean code for formal verification and a traditional-style narrative proof. Like the general long-form output of frontier models, the math papers produced appear to be generally correct technically, but written in an ungraceful and sometimes hard-to-follow style, so they are often polished by a human mathematician as of today.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#248

Post by meken »

mrbungie wrote: post #226
meken wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tao has a spiel in his recent interview with Dwarkesh where he says that AIs are very good at explaining things - so just have the AI explain the proof in a human-friendly way.

For sure, but this was supposedly ~18 million dollars of compute, afaik 100 pages paper / lean proof and only god knows how many bytes of chat interactions + thought traces. Scale matters.

I bet it can be decomposed quite nicely though. At the top level, there are probably only like five steps. Dig as deep as you want into any of those steps (i.e. engineering).

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#249

Post by aethelraed »

bityard wrote: post #208
senshan wrote: post #165

From "Jokester" by Isaac Asimov 1956: "Early in the history of Multivac, it had become apparent that there was one big bottleneck: the questioning procedure. Multivac could answer the problems of humanity, all the problems, if -- if it were asked meaningful questions. But as knowledge accumulated at an ever-faster rate, it became ever more difficult to locate those meaningful questions." [0] https://web.archive.org/w…

I don't see why that should be a problem, as we already know the answer is 42 in any case.

There is as yet insufficient Data for a meaningful answer.

[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708807

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