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A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

41–50 of 641 posts

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#41
To be honest I didn’t get that much outrage here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662116

It seems like a lot of the issue here is that these problems aren’t interesting in and of themselves, but they lead down interesting roads. It defeats the purpose if you solve them without getting any real understanding.

It’s akin to saying you’ve solved “pancake flipping” problems with a waffle maker, or “travelling salesman” problems with a zoom meeting.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#42
While I agree with this and appreciate Tao and other mathematicians to take the time to do this. There are similar concerns for many many other fields aka there is a general misalignment of technology. Take Software engineering for example, I can't believe there is a class of software engineers who wake up everyday and tell themselves, "today is the day I am going to automate the rest of my job".

Lets forget the hyper intellectual fields like maths and software engineering for a moment. What about taxi drivers? The best minds in silicon valley wake up everyday to automate the jobs of taxi drivers - TFA can be reworded as - 'The misalignment of AI/Tech in Transportation'. Remember the Nepal disaster that happened a couple weeks ago - the largest cranes that they had were stuck in the mud and couldn't move. There were no tools which could help the rescue teams at that time. Its weird that billions have been spent on making a ride automated to make a taxi driver redundant but no improvement in tech for rescue teams.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#43
post #15

There is a contradiction here, among many: 1. it is hard to justify 20 years of education at this point, 2. with no such people around, who will guide those (supposedly) supersmart machines? A. Ronacher (who builds harnesses for a living) complained today that he has no idea what Astra is doing. Imagine a bunch of slop kiddies facing an aging AI-generated codebase. Not to mention the maths.

Debatably the people who were getting 20 years of education will still be just as capable, and the 20 years of education was always a side effect of their capabilities, not the cause of them.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#44
The AI driven mode collapse of human thought advances. I am no skeptic or anti-AI, but this is definitely a concern I share. You even notice it in normal mundane tasks like programming, never mind the AI generated prose that we at least have become somewhat allergic to.

It wouldn't be so bad if you could just sit it out and say "Oh well, once the labs get bored with marketable domain X, humans will remigrate and re-apply creativity to it", but by then the damage might have been done and a field destroyed as an occupation. I don't know what to do about it, but I appreciate calling out the cynical tone-deafness of the AI companies here.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#46
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any serious mathematician would read the LLM output and rework their understanding. I read a bourgain paper a week in grad school and they're probably worse than an LLM generated paper. I still had to recreate the tricks in my own language. As far as I can tell the plagiarism accusations are also coping to the fact that the new models are super human at slam dunking research projects. Do we think that OpenAI is going…

For your sake, based on your comments throughout this post, I hope you didn't pay for any stage of your education.

I have a paper in JEMS and have solved 20 year old conjectures. I also know that math academia is a catty game which is mostly driven by politics and ego

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#47

To be honest I didn’t get that much outrage here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662116 It seems like a lot of the issue here is that these problems aren’t interesting in and of themselves, but they lead down interesting roads. It defeats the purpose if you solve them without getting any real understanding. It’s akin to saying you’ve solved “pancake flipping” problems with a waffle maker, or “travelling sales…

Going to the gym and using a forklift

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#48
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What benefit is there if the machine has unlocked understanding but no human has? What incentives are there for humans to learn and gain such understanding from machines?

Because it's beautiful. Because you love math for maths sake and not some weird egotistical game

the way LLMs write math is not beautiful. it is exactly analogous to the software that LLMs develop is not beautiful. it may achieve impressive end products, but if you like understanding the methods/architecture, looking under the hood is often a field of horrors.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#49
Any proof for or against a mathematical conjecture, bruteforced by AI can be the spark for new insights. I'll concede that to the AI companies.

But I agree with the sentiment that the marketing behind these "discoveries" is disingenious. They pretend they solved the problem, but it still takes a bunch of humans to reduce the solution to a simplified and sensible explanation.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#50
> ... 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists —

As a non-native English speaker, I initially understood this to mean that all living Fields Medallists had signed. I later realized that it meant only that all the signatories were Fields Medallists.

(Apparently, there are 47 living Fields Medallists today.)

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