Knowledge is not a private guild. And this revolution will not stop just because you're upset.
What can be solved, will be solved. And that's a good thing.
A misalignment of AI in mathematics
391–400 of 633 posts
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. My other favorite example are books. Why do nonfiction books exist? There are some pathologies and corner cases, but fundamentally: to develop and share new ideas. Downstream from that, if it reads well and if you're lucky, you make some money. But now, LLMs can generate hundreds of books per hour. They make up 80-90% of new arrivals in many nonfiction categories on Amazon. They short-circuit the system, allowi…
I would argue that creating an llm book that sells also requires human labour, just a different kind of one.
It doesn't, that's the whole point. You can produce output that passes the smell test with naive buyers in a matter of hours. If you want to write good LLM books, then you gotta work closer to human speed - weeks, months - which allows others to produce 100 slop-books in the same timeframe. You still lose.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#393This sounds a lot to me like people in the 90's complaining that computers were destroying chess. Thirty years later, chess is more popular than it ever was, and chess players are better than they ever have been. I wouldn't be surprised if there are now more chess books now than there ever have been. Furthermore, it turns out that a lot of chess books written before computers were just wrong about a lot of things. It…
But computers have destroyed chess as a "sport". Nobody will sit to watch two chess programs compete, or analyze their tactics. Kinda like how now, anybody can construct a "game" over the weekend or a new song or a slop video. The value of each of these decreases to 0 as the slop overwhelms.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#394Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#395> solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight. This is the effect of AI on most intellectual disciplines, and it’s a real worry.
Playing a devil's advocate. Why do we need understanding ? To take an example i would say ~99% of the population do not understand how combustion engines or how semiconductors work, what say another 1% ? Is the fear post-apocalyptic in nature ? We need some human priesthood to carry on tradition ? why ? Let's assume in the next decade GPT-7 PRO Ultra is cheaply ubiquitous, inspectable, reproducible, transferable, rea…
I grew up in a cult. Based on my experience, I believe that the most dangerous thing a human can do is to allow someone else to do their thinking for them.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#396OpenAI should just apologize for having been too greedy. That’s it, as simple as it gets. The fact that it never will is the biggest red flag.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#397At some point we will lose track of all the ai discoveries that are worth remembering. Academia with the publication system had a way of retrieving old discoveries and build upon them. If my LLM session found something groundbreaking in between the billion tokens it produced, how would you ever know?
LLMs are excellent at doing searches of the math literature; presumably they'd also be good at doing searches of AI-generated results.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#398While 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…
> 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".
And here I thought this was the whole point…
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#399As 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…
Even before AI we used to say if you write code that you only barely understand, then it will be to complicated to debug. (and/or maintain) Mochizuki was still one human and it required legions of other humans to unpack and untangle to confirm that it didn't lead to anywhere in particular. AI is now capable of constructions so complex that no human or human team can unpack. And its ability to increase that complexity…
For the interested; the saying I believe you are referencing in regards to writing code / debugging is from Brian Kernighan, specifically:
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
It's prescient.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#400This is really only a short-term problem where the AI companies only have the internal models that can solve these. In the “long” term, which could honestly mean months, everyone will have access to Bel/C /D -level models capable of solving these anyway.
This. Like programming, the community will shortly be forced to come to terms with a lot of new self-proclaimed mathematicians “vibe-solving” problems and dumping solutions without understanding them. It’s not really a special case for mathematics.
That's going to force formalization to become required for any new result to be taken seriously.