231–240 of 641 posts
Seems the same to me. And it'll be the same in all industries soon enough. And then it won't just be the junior people.
All the same problem: what do people do now?
The concerns seem valid. I'm unclear what the ask is, though. What, even in theory, is a practical and realistic fix?
Well, they could ask frontier labs to stop publishing math results. I find it telling that they stop short of explicitly doing this.
I wish this letter could be more egalitarian and include the view points of those who AREN’T the beneficiaries of a highly competitive winner-take-all system.
Since the common narrative is that AI frees up labor to do other things (engineering -> trades), maybe we can celebrate that genius mathematicians will now spend time teaching children how to be as smart as them?
As a mathematician maybe I am a little more optimistic than this declaration. I am thinking of Mochizuki's abc conjecture: He worked in relative isolation, and dumped a huge incomprehensible proof on the community (to oversimplify a bit). That's not totally unlike what might happen if AI generates a huge, incomprehensible proof of let's say RH. Well, what is the result? In the Mochizuki case, it was a lot of skeptici…
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 o…
Would you argue it didnt benefit humanity, because taxi/bus drivers are nolonger required
Keep in mind employees at AI companies are publicly stating that they believe they're risking a >10% chance of human extinction. They're knowingly risking the lives of every man, woman, and child to continue the work. The lives of their own sons and daughters. A person already rationalizing that isn't going to shed a tear for the careers of mathematicians. Just a bug on the windshield.
I’m trying to determine now if Terence Tao was a plant or a useful idiot. Maybe both.
Train an LLM with no advanced math texts: only basic math up to 6th grade, conversational text and literary works.
Interact with it (you cannot refer to anything past 6th grade math since you don't know it yourself) and get it to propose a solution to a real world problem. e.g., come up with RSA to practically secure communication.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The statement is not about AI but about the behaviour of AI companies. OpenAI have put vast resource into solving open maths problems: many millions of dollars of compute just on the Navier-Stokes result, plus whatever they spent on the broader Millenium Prize problems initiative and the other results they have published. Anthropic are doing the same. The statement is asking them to stop doing this. AI companies are…
> What the mathematicians are saying is stop pouring resources that most mathematicians can only dream of accessing into projects that are actively damaging to their field. They face a massive challenge of figuring out how maths can evolve in the face of this new technology, and this is not helping. Is it reasonable for any field to make such demands? If this were doctors objecting to AI becoming good at medical prac…