I wonder what Demis Hassabis thinks about this. I thought he cared a lot about mathematics.
A misalignment of AI in mathematics
491–500 of 646 posts
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
The numerical results are trivial to check. I wrote the analytical results in Lean by hand before asking a former professor to confirm after asking him to keep this private. They're valid.
It's really tough to come to terms with it but making academic contributions in general from the outside (with or without AI tbh) is not often welcome and the whole process feels very gate-kept.
If that's the case, that makes me much less sympathetic, even though I can understand how it's very disturbing to see the field suddenly changing like this.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#493> We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work This is the crux of it and goes far beyond Mathematics or Computer Science. To get a bunch of humans to do anything, you have to motivate them. Kleos and Timē; renown and stuff. These AI companies threaten to rip this away from everyone but themselves, and this recent millennium prize is the perfect example. Solving this problem as a human would have led to tr…
These are both big motivations but not the only ones.
But there's still play. There's still curiosity. And there's still the drive to understand something for yourself.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#494Maybe mathematicians should be aligned better, rather than AI? The current measure of a successful mathematician is the problems they have solved or worked on. At some point in history, the measure of a successful scholar was how well one could copy manuscripts. Once we have a tool that starts to work well for this task, it's time to define success differently. It's a classic alignment problem! ;) But seriously, thes…
Another historical analogy: this is kind of like the transition from alchemy to chemistry.
Interesting analogy
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#495Strange they are rallying against something their fellow mathematicians had a hand in creating.
Let's focus on the subject and try to distinguish the technology and the frontier companies selling it. That's the key point in understanding the whole stance.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still an optimistic scenario. Artificial superintelligence may develop hypermathematics of a kind that never will be accesible to human mind, enhanced or not. One can't teach geometry to ants even if you put them on a Moebius strip. It would be more like Lem's novel where it completely disappears from the human horizon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV
Which is why if humanity had empathy, it would be working on how to make smarter ants, so that they can learn more advanced geometry.
I love that as a goal!
Perhaps indeed a better understanding of what intelligence really is would allow this sort of Uplift (as in Brin's books).
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think the parent comment meant professional, high-level chess. The kind people get played to play, not just do for a hobby. That's absolutely on life support. I'm not sure what the equivalent would look like in the math field, but it probably involves a lot of mathematicians losing their jobs and the quality of human-produced math decreasing overall. The quality of the math in general would be fine, since in this s…
>but no one understands it, did it make a sound?
Does your "one" only contain humans or does it also contain other AI systems. AI math is not a single monolithic thing, but a distributed one. I see value in sharing proofs even among just AI.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still an optimistic scenario. Artificial superintelligence may develop hypermathematics of a kind that never will be accesible to human mind, enhanced or not. One can't teach geometry to ants even if you put them on a Moebius strip. It would be more like Lem's novel where it completely disappears from the human horizon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV
What’s optimistic or non-optimistic specifically about the machine having a system of mathematics beyond our comprehension within it? Why should we care about that in itself?
In the first case, we'd still have a chance to take a glance at the frontier of discovery (even if ordinary human mathematicians had to spent years translating what metahumans achieved).
In the second case all human-level maths would be solved and what lies beyond would be always out of our scope.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#499Earlier 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 do we do about the problems that don't require many millions of dollars in resources? Last weekend I spun up a small agent swarm and pointed it at a field of math I have some affinity towards. Within four hours I had settled three conjectures, one of which is rather famous (for the field, not in general). It cost me about four hundred dollars. I am at a loss about what to do with these results. On one hand I fee…
It is interesting isn't it.
You asked for a painting. A robot made the painting. You looked at it and said, "well, I guess it's good. Should I put it online or something? Dunno. Hey Fred, what do you think of this?"
Meanwhile, your next door neighbor spends their entire life developing their understanding of life through art. They "understand" (maybe not in a way they can articulate) art. You go next door, you look at their painting and say, "well I guess it's good." But you also understand that your neighbor is just like you, and maybe you are a painter in another way.
I find it strange that, people can't see that, we don't need to solve hunger and poverty and work balance, and etc, by a round-about make-super-intelligent-AI. We could just solve it. It's pretty obvious how to, as well.
We can all be painters, if we put restrictions on the psychopaths.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#500Nothing AI companies will change the value of math, as William Thurston said: The product of math is clarity and understanding, not theorems by themselves. What they seek for the IPO is devilish and misleading, and doesn't serve the true purpose of the math.