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How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

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51–60 of 242 posts

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#51

Moving forward, I can't imagine other mathematicians wanting to have this kind of experience. So there has to be a shift away from these services.

I'm a mathematician. I have a lot of trepidation about these tools and what they mean for the future of the profession. That said... most of us are not working on problems as famous as Navier-Stokes. Even if OpenAI could scoop me based on my back-and-forth with ChatGPT, which I presume they could if they threw $15 million worth of compute at it, I highly doubt they'd bother.

The fact that anyone has to make that trade off with that through process shows a company and culture that is untrustworthy. OpenAI isnt open, isnt a non-profit, isnt for the benefit of humanity, and isnt even for the benefit of users at this point, its users are vassals providing training data so their models can reach ASI first.

I am going all in on sovereign ai even if its worse, these companies have shown they not only dont deserve trust but are actively stealing past and present intellectual property from humanity and users.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, this company wants everyone and every organization on Earth to use their software, and reserve the right to then tell anyone how the resulting work can be published and credited? Real solid business model there, how could it ever fail?

That's not what the comment you're replying to or the article says. I feel like I'm going crazy reading comments here and elsewhere, am I not reading the same articles as everyone else?

There's a lot of unverified hearsay but the crux of the problem is that there is controversy around using this company's tools, the attribution of the resulting work, and the company for some reason competing with its users. The whole thing reeks and my point is: people won't ask for the chromatography spectrum of the turd, they will walk away.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#54

My impression: the re-aristocratization of scientific research seems inevitable.

What do you mean? In any case mathematics is humanity's oldest open source project going on for millenia, it never belonged to a single country, institution or class.

Only the idle and curious rich

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#55
post #21

Does it matter who gets the credit at this point? Both used AI to do 99%+ of the work. So... do machines have ego?

I guess, you don't use AI for work? Otherwise, why should you be paid for it? Should you only be paid for the code you actually wrote yourself?

I do. But the difference is: do I go around bragging that my agent worked for 88h to solve a problem? Where is the credit coming from? Is it coming from the: I was the first one to think about throwing a prompt: "Solve Riemann Hypothesis" and it turns out that by luck of the non-deterministic behavior of the agent, it got right? Wow, that is a lot of merit really. Congrats...

Sorry the sarcasm, but really your point makes absolutely no sense. It is completely different to design something with AI and then execute, validate, evolve vs just prompt it machine-g-brrrr style and get a result. This brings an important question. Nowadays I don't write code, I review code, I review systems behavior and get paid for it. Will that be the same for math researchers? Their prompt/problem is already well-posed out there. Ours, in the day-to-day, are not. Will the first one to verify AI work get the credit? or is it going to be the dumdum that types a simple prompt and has the compute to run it for 21321 hours? I absolutely don't get your point here. Or you are just rage baiting

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#56

Moving forward, I can't imagine other mathematicians wanting to have this kind of experience. So there has to be a shift away from these services.

Personally this is a watershed moment for researchers and grad students I know. All of them are close sourcing WIP repos, not putting their progress in LLMs, or have lab level initiatives to self host models.

I am building a federated hosting platform that I plan to opensource for this exact reason for our company and similar users. I would love to talk to these teams (we are a small team at Duke and a health care company).

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#57
post #28
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from [Buckmaster and Alpöge’s] usage of our products helped improve our models. Well yeah, if you use the free product they train on your data, ... I thought this was widely understood?

If you read Buckmasters statement, he specifically notes that they used the paid subscriptions, iirc.

The paid subscriptions have opt-out for sharing data for training purposes. I think it's on by default.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#58
OpenAI has messed up big time here by competing with their customers. It would have become the norm for humans and mathematicians to use the tools and publish bigger results any way. If OpenAI didn’t run for credit, this theorem itself may have been proven by Buckmaster OR others in maybe a year or two. But now the bigger issue than AI solving problems is the issue of chat privacy, at the end of the day.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#59

This right here, or at least the thought of this, is why in the not so far future, businesses can't (won't?) be using these LLMs services. You cannot risk companies like Anthropic, OpenAI or their business partners like Microsoft having unfettered access to proprietary data on your company/businesses. It it likely that they or rogue employees will use the information to make a profit? It's pure speculation, but I'd s…

It is even worse. Just them knowing or having an inkling that someone is close to achieving a solution might be enough for them to spawn a team of thousands of agents and outrun you.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, this company wants everyone and every organization on Earth to use their software, and reserve the right to then tell anyone how the resulting work can be published and credited? Real solid business model there, how could it ever fail?

That's not what the comment you're replying to or the article says. I feel like I'm going crazy reading comments here and elsewhere, am I not reading the same articles as everyone else?

You are. Most people have just long decided to forgo nuance for the simplicity of snark and hate as a default response
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