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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

#411

Post by nomel »

magicalist wrote: post #122
nomel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soldiers rarely know the history of war, and war historians are rarely soldiers.

> Soldiers rarely know the history of war, and war historians are rarely soldiers. I mean, besides the empty platitude that we have no reason to assume applies here, we can easily search and find Tao commenting on the history and philosophy of mathematics. This is a really weird subthread.

It's not at all empty. Specific expertise does not imply general knowledge, and shouldn't be assumed.

"Commenting on" does not equal historian of mathematics aware of all the past politics and drama from 100 years ago. There's no reason to assume an expert in applied mathematics is also a historian, especially when their statements are somewhat in conflict with history. And, there's nothing wrong with that, if they have a knowledge gap in some boring past bickering when they're one of the best in the world at what they do, ffs.

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

#412

Post by caycep »

vessenes wrote: post #3

That’s not untrue. But it’s also a misstatement of mathematical history. Many leading mathematicians historically have been highly competitive — Gauss comes to mind. Woe betide the lesser intellect that sent Gauss some ideas. The Newton Leibniz controversy was very serious business at the time in the UK and the continent. It was considered at the least a sin to reveal that sqrt(2) was irrational to those outside Pyth…

Personal competition is one thing, but competition against a corporation?

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

#413

Post by apublicfrog »

stymaar wrote: post #358
kamaal wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>which actually deals with the finiteness of the list of problems that a machine successfully exhausts. This is already the case with most DevOps jobs with Claude Code. There are only that many finite issues that need fixing in production, even for very large systems. So you don't need all that many people to run ops these days.

Yet as a customer I don't think I've got to endure as many outages in my life before 2026 as I did for the past 9 months… And it's not just github, everything seems to be down on a daily basis right now.

If we're being anecdotal, I haven't had a single outage of anything affect me at all this year, but have had many in previous years. Often the thing blamed publicly has been incorrect too.

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

#414

Post by 20k »

paxys wrote: post #352
20k wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I stole someone's private research notes and republished them loosely in my own words, they'd correctly be pissed This was unpublished research that was stolen, and constitutes plagiarism and academic fraud by even the strictest definition

They are not “private research notes” if they are generated by an LLM.

The prompts they put in are the equivalent

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

#415

Post by Nition »

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.

You may recall though that whole problem with '42' as the answer was the lack of knowledge of the question. The Earth was created as an attempt to provide the question, but was unfortunately demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass just before the question was resolved.

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

#416

Post by nater5000 »

I hear what he's saying, and I'm not saying he's wrong (in essence), but I think Tao (like a lot of other people) are going to have to get with the program a bit. AI is going to radically change a lot of things. It's going to radically change mathematics. It's going to radically change the way people think about mathematics, study mathematics, value mathematics, etc. There's no stopping that. What Tao needs to be contemplating is what that new world for mathematics looks like, cause trying to preserve what we have, now, is effectively impossible at this point.

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

#417

Post by Mond_ »

nater5000 wrote: post #416

I hear what he's saying, and I'm not saying he's wrong (in essence), but I think Tao (like a lot of other people) are going to have to get with the program a bit. AI is going to radically change a lot of things. It's going to radically change mathematics. It's going to radically change the way people think about mathematics, study mathematics, value mathematics, etc. There's no stopping that. What Tao needs to be con…

Tao is so incredibly ahead of the curve in this regard that you trying to accuse him of not "going with the program" is a bit silly.

He's not an AI Luddite by any means.

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

#418

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

znnajdla wrote: post #407
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for putting it so succinctly. I find that lots of people get "stuck" in the current state of things - they think that AI will continue to improve, but they inherently believe (perhaps subconsciously) that humans will always have the edge in things like "ingenuity", "inventiveness" or "curiosity". I don't blame them, I also believed that until very recently. I thought there was something unique and special a…

I don't get this take at all. Do you feel inferior that bears are stronger than you? Or that a machine can lift more weight than you? Or that a calculator can calculate faster than you? These AI things are machines which are completely under our control. Even if they become more intelligent than us, that doesn't mean that it has authority over us. There are plenty of very intelligent humans which work under the autho…

> What makes you think that just because an AI is more intelligent that it will not be completely subject to our authority? It's just a tool in our hands.

Because it would be like 100 chimps trying to make a million humans subject to their authority.

Geoffrey Hinton, considered "The Godfather of AI" for his pioneering work on neural networks, and who now says he somewhat regrets his life work due to the existential risks, has said similar things, e.g. "How many examples do you know of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing? There are very few examples"

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

#419

Post by torginus »

kamaal wrote: post #351
nine_k wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that a more appropriate reference from that time would be "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke [1], which actually deals with the finiteness of the list of problems that a machine successfully exhausts. [1]: https://hex.ooo/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html

>>which actually deals with the finiteness of the list of problems that a machine successfully exhausts. This is already the case with most DevOps jobs with Claude Code. There are only that many finite issues that need fixing in production, even for very large systems. So you don't need all that many people to run ops these days.

I am kind of saddened by technology in general that we need LLMs to deal with it in the first place.

It used to be that you compiled an executable, copied it onto the target computer and it worked. Then came servers, where you had to open some ports, set up some init scripts, maybe a db connection string.

This has evolved into a fractal of awfulness of a myriad of options and problems, each of which more elaborate and specifically limited than what came before, so you can't really use any one of them, but a combination, which is bound to interact weirdly, giving you some unique problems.

LLMs are great at solving these kinds of problems, but these problems should not exist in the first place, and they just waste everyone's time.

When it comes to actual meaningful product questions (and not just 'how/where does this code run'), LLMs are basically next to hopeless.

Since LLMs are very good with dealing with the BS, I hope they'll be useful in making people recognize and do away with BS altogether, and we can go back to the simple olden days.

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

#420

Post by diedyesterday »

On the virtue of scarcity, being mortal, being NOT omniscient, NOT omnipotent, being Finite, etc. (thus arising the need to optimize, etc.):

[Fig Tree] "By end of the story Gilgamesh is human; He is Us; We see the Deep; That's our gift as humans; We fight to understand something no god could ever could (emergence and richness from scarcity); The gods don't need to fear death so they don't have to live an impassionate life; It means nothing to them to run out of time; "Seeing the deep" is the apex of human potential, not a transgression into godhood; It's something that only humans can do."

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