Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 641 posts

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#61

Post by npinsker »

dwa3592 wrote: post #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 hype…

The point of transportation is to get from point A to point B, so almost nobody will care whether that's done via automation.

The point of e.g. art isn't just to produce a finished piece, so people may care about more than the end result, making AI replacement of human artists more contentious.

Tao is arguing that the point of math is also not just to produce solutions to problems.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#62

Post by HeavenFox »

jeremysalwen wrote: post #20

To me it doesn't seem like what AI has destroyed is the ability for mathematicians to develop understanding and share it with each other, but rather it's destroyed the yardstick (solving open problems) that has traditionally been used to measure how much they have contributed to that understanding. I do see how this is a problem in terms of assigning credit, but I think the cat is already out of the bag in terms of t…

Agreed. The problem is not with AI per se, but with the reward mechanism in academia in general.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#64

Post by vatsachak »

NoDodgeQuestion wrote: post #52
vatsachak wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You feel lean4 proof, that you 99.999% chance not understand is beautiful?

https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/32d9f210-8b73-45e0-91bc-82a30aef8...

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#65

Post by datakan »

Everyones outraged all the time. It doesn't mean anything anymore. It's that meme from years ago about the red ants and the black ants living in a box peacefully until someone shakes the box and they start trying to kill each other. They go after each other and not the one shaking the box.

OpenAI/Anthropic are shaking the box.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#66

Post by gritzko »

eqmvii wrote: post #43
gritzko wrote: 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.

7+20=27

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#67

Post by wbl »

jeremysalwen wrote: post #20

To me it doesn't seem like what AI has destroyed is the ability for mathematicians to develop understanding and share it with each other, but rather it's destroyed the yardstick (solving open problems) that has traditionally been used to measure how much they have contributed to that understanding. I do see how this is a problem in terms of assigning credit, but I think the cat is already out of the bag in terms of t…

Open problems are not that yardstick. Fermat's Last Theorem is the result of Wiles and Wiles-Taylor, but without key results from Serre, Ribet, Ihara, Langlands-Tunnels, and Frey's program none of what Wiles did would work. But Wiles did get the prize. Nowadays I think the inputs have shrunk a bit by doing more in the R=T theorem so less other cleverness needed.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#69

Post by stymaar »

andriy_koval wrote: post #29
rbtprograms wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tao basically reiterating "AI is making us dumber" a bit more eloquently and applied to math.

Its by choice. Mathematicians still can use AI to "achieve the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight"

At the individual level any mathematicians can, but the social group of “mathematicians” will not unless drastic social changes are made, because that's not how the system works today. Drastic social changes usually take decades, and funerals, to occur, so the reasonable hypothesis is that it's not going to change fast enough.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#70

Post by TSiege »

kenjackson wrote: post #36

"how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place." That sounds like an "us problem", not an AI or OpenAI/Anthropic problem.

Are you implying that OpenAI using someones unpublished research without their permission to solve an career defining math problem with their latest model in order to publish first is a problem with the mathematicians?

My read on this document is that people's work isn't being fairly cited more than what does it mean to be a mathematician in this age.

Post reply on HN