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A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

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Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#291

Post by pfdietz »

dominotw wrote: post #216
omnicognate wrote: post #201

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…

yeah beacuse no one trust any of their benchmark results now they are scrambling to find a signal thats undeniable

I expected this. They prove a millenium result, but it doesn't count because they are bad people.

It's this sort of thing that motivates people to burn down the institution you might be trying to defend.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#292

Post by trillobyte »

td2 wrote: post #235
trillobyte wrote: post #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 o…

But its normal, and good, that technologal progress creates, and destroys some jobs. Imagin a cheap, 100% reliable, self driving car would be released. Death from Traffic incidence fall by orders of magnitude Would you argue it didnt benefit humanity, because taxi/bus drivers are nolonger required

I'm actually a AI optimist. I think it'd be great to have everybody getting around in self driving vehicles.

If all that AI brought resulted in just taxi/bus drivers being phased out of their jobs in a thoughtful way, then that would be more manageable at the society level. But we're talking about almost all sectors of the economy.

If the magnitude of changes that OpenAI and Athropic believe will be delivered with increasingly powerful AI (and robotics) comes in a time frame that significantly worsens a large proportion of people's lives, this is a different situation. Can super powerful AI not be developed in a way that minimizes such disruption?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#293

Post by tmhn2 »

well_ackshually wrote: post #246
tmhn2 wrote: post #200

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…

So it wasted everyone's time, thousands of hours of research trying to disprove something said very loudly. What OpenAI is doing is a DoS of the scientific community: wasting your time trying to check if they're not wrong, and claiming glory in the mean time.

That's true, but the story would have unfolded differently if Mochizuki had a lean-verified proof and was correct. I guess baked into my premise is that AI is producing reliable proofs (in the long term at least).

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#294

Post by oytis »

Xirdus wrote: post #279
oytis wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not an option to make academia more like a normal job, where people focus on collectively achieved outcomes rather than credit, priority etc.?

Almost every "normal" job has regular performance reviews where individual contributions, not collective outcomes, are reviewed and used as a sole input for raises, promotions, and firings. If you can't sufficiently document what you personally did, you might've as well not done anything at all.

Yes, that's true, but it is still generally accepted that a completed project is a result of some collective effort where people of varying degree of seniority and ability contribute. There is also not a singular event of a project being completed with a list of heroes/geniuses making it happen, but rather a whole lifecycle of gradual development, maintenance and going out of relevance with contributors coming and going.

I can imagine mathematics of the future being more like that rather than history of discoveries with dates and names

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#296

Post by kenjackson »

pred_ wrote: post #166
kenjackson wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know this article was about that issue at all. Yeah, if the issue is properly citing work then yes, OpenAI needs to do that. But the article read like it was tackling a completely different issue.

That's one of several issues, obviously a big one, and they do touch on it: > Often these solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others. As in all creative professions, this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions.

Yes. I forgot about that section. That is probably the one thing that the AI companies can and should do better on.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#297

Post by famouswaffles »

tmhn2 wrote: post #280
ksoped wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the isolated dumping, it's the fast, isolated, possibly untraceable dumping, without long term support. It'll basically become slop fatigue if OpenAI starts dumping out proofs faster than the community can keep up, and some turn out to be wrong, never formalize it, don't stay to support it, etc.

I wonder if they will continue to dump proofs, though? Their point has been made, the novelty will wear off, and it maybe won't be a priority use of their resources to spend however many millions on another big proof--they will move on to the next thing to show off I'm sure. At that point, the ones generating proofs will be, I hope, mathematicians (professional and otherwise) that are more interested in the results a…

They aren't going to stop at one, that's for sure. They already claimed they have "made substantial progress" on another millenium problem. Let's say they bag another one (Hodge and/or BSD according to the rumors), if it looks like their internal model could solve P/NP or Riemann Hypothesis, you think they wouldn't take that chance ?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#298

Post by johnsmith1840 »

They can get with the program or be the equivalent of a genius SWE writing assembly on punchcards in 2026.

The only thing I read from this is their ego being bruised by a machine.

If these people cared more about discovery and advancement of human knowledge the only thing they should be doing is celebrating. There's no proof of plagarism but that's an independent issue.

How are they not realizing that in the future children will be able to do impossibly hard math but they will be doing something we can't even think of as of now.

One world class mathematician in the future could be advancing mathematics the equivalent of one Riemann hypothesis A DAY.

How are they not celbrating this as the achievment of the centry? Who cares about plagarism at this scale. It has been solved and it wouldn't have been without AI.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#299

Post by mna_ »

318274 wrote: post #277
stabbles wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The maths community is now in the antithesis phase, synthesis will take a while ;) Lee Sedol said in an interview that "losing to AI, in a sense, meant my entire world was collapsing. ... I could no longer enjoy the game. So I retired", and I think there will be folks in the mathematical community who would feel the same when the solutions pages to hard problems are suddenly available. But on the other hand, people l…

Chess is kept afloat by a couple of billionaires like Sinquefield, MBS and the guy who sponsors freestyle (Fisher random) chess. Carlsen is bored by studying engine lines. The popularity is boosted by YouTubers because chess is very suitable for somewhat higher class content. I'm not sure we'd want that world for math. Positions will be cut just like archaeologist positions are cut now.

Chess is kept afloat by chess players, not by billionaires. If all the billionaire backers stopped sponsoring tournaments, people like me would still play, still pay for chess club memberships, still pay entry fees for tournaments, and still buy chess books, and so on.
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