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A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

91–100 of 672 posts

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#91
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.

If that is the case, if the pursuit of math is not instrumental, then there is no issue with ai.

You can take a leisurely drive on your Mc even when self driving taxis can take you from a to b.

It must necessarily reduce to a fear of reduced funding to math fields.

Which is congruent to the taxi analogy.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#95
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Perhaps these Fields Medalists are coping that OpenAI made them look stupid, as you suggested. And perhaps you're coping because of some personal grudge you have against academia.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#98
post #65

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.

I don't understand how that metaphor applies here, you seem to contradict yourself. The mathematicians are mad at openai. If the mathematicians are the black ants and OpenAI is shaking the box, who are the red ants?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#99

[flagged]

Not quite, all the proofs or disproofs so far AFAIK were using existing methods that humans developed and were already using to attack the problems, but AI is just more thorough. What AI can't do currently is develop new mathematical methods to attack problems that can't be solved with existing methods and AFAIK there is no known path to get current gen AI to do so.

That's fair and I agree. But stockfish can play successful middle games and there's no reason that AI cannot create research programs

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#100
OpenAI: "Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."

- Except the mathematicians who we'll scoop and cause existential dread among their entire field.

- Except the software developers. They'll need to become plumbers or live on UBI.

- Except the people in countries that can't afford the cost of AI tokens to keep up with the rest of the world.

Just keep picking off groups of humans for the "benefits of all humanity"... while building larger and larger disparities been the have a lots and the just have enoughs.

We're going to build humans a utopia but along the way we'll leave a trail of destruction because that's not our problem.

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