701–710 of 718 posts
And math undergraduate and graduate courses withering from lack of applicants and lack of funding .
Of course the next question the despicable AI money grubbers will come out with is, "Do we really need mathematicians ?"
I never expected this many people (on this thread) arguing semantics and what not. I know that not everyone has morality and ethics, but I didn't realize it was this bad. I'm afraid of the ripple effect of the agenda pushed by AI companies will have. In future and even now, they say AI has significantly progressed math and scientific research in general. There is truth to this, but the narrative has done more damage…
> I know that not everyone has morality and ethics, but I didn't realize it was this bad. This is a very disrespectful way to make a point about acting with integrity. You should consider that maybe your views on what makes something ethical or moral are not universal -- and that coming to a discussion with the assumption that your position is the only valid one is not conducive to convincing others who disagree with…
I now realize many people have different tolerance level for this.
I never expected this many people (on this thread) arguing semantics and what not. I know that not everyone has morality and ethics, but I didn't realize it was this bad. I'm afraid of the ripple effect of the agenda pushed by AI companies will have. In future and even now, they say AI has significantly progressed math and scientific research in general. There is truth to this, but the narrative has done more damage…
> Many graduate students (I know) are having a crisis if any of their research worth it? If AI can (or will) do everything, what's the point of doing experiments and all? This will eventually deter a whole generation of curious minded students from research. Those who think it's me or the machine will fail. Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed.
Yes, but, in the last week we saw an AI lab front-run[1] the research of mathematicians doing what you suggest. The lab threw something like $15M of compute at a problem and the researchers were able to spend nowhere near that. I think the authors are more concerned about that kind of asymmetry and race to publish the results.
[1] - I am not going to debate whether that was deliberate on the part of the lab or if it crept into training data, etc. I don't know and don't think it matters towards the point of the authors here.
To me it doesn't seem like what AI has destroyed is the ability for mathematicians to develop understanding and share it with each other, but rather it's destroyed the yardstick (solving open problems) that has traditionally been used to measure how much they have contributed to that understanding. I do see how this is a problem in terms of assigning credit, but I think the cat is already out of the bag in terms of t…
The issue of credit is a relatively minor point in the declaration. It's more about bypassing the culture and processes mathematicians have developed that lead to human understanding, generating new ideas, and bringing up new generations of mathematicians. (See also his article about "non-renewable mining" of good problems.) Reducing mathematics to "let's just generate results through an isolated and automated system…
What a load of croc. This entire debate is fueled by a perceived lack of attribution. The AI learnt from researchers and did not give them a sporting chance of being first before scooping them. They were expecting some sort of fair play, instead they got a ruthless machine. Every other tangent to this debate is irrelevant, the culture, the community, the shared symbolic growth. Every mathematician I know is secretly trying to one-up their peers.
I never expected this many people (on this thread) arguing semantics and what not. I know that not everyone has morality and ethics, but I didn't realize it was this bad. I'm afraid of the ripple effect of the agenda pushed by AI companies will have. In future and even now, they say AI has significantly progressed math and scientific research in general. There is truth to this, but the narrative has done more damage…
This story's comments are heavily astroturfed. Just compare with the comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639408
To me it doesn't seem like what AI has destroyed is the ability for mathematicians to develop understanding and share it with each other, but rather it's destroyed the yardstick (solving open problems) that has traditionally been used to measure how much they have contributed to that understanding. I do see how this is a problem in terms of assigning credit, but I think the cat is already out of the bag in terms of t…
I feel a similar fate will befall engineers too. Your predictions anre quite interesting from that perspective. Markets defined entirely by law have distorted our collective understanding of what can actually be built with the knowledge our species has accumulated thus far. How will traditional shields that have protected capital accumulation in tech to survive in a world where governments now realize control of tech…
Tao's critique of AI in the field of mathematics reminds me of what French art critic Charles Baudelaire said in the 19th century about photography [0]. Baudelaire argued that photography became a haven for failed painters, the sorts of hacks that could not finish proper training. Photography, as a mechanical rendering of the world, could only record what already existed; it couldn't transform reality the way a paint…
I have listened quite a few interviews with Tao and I see him being very careful about criticizing AI. He very often emphasizes the usefulness of it. Where he is critical has a lot of merit. One of the points I clearly remember him saying that having AI be able to solve many of the open problems, regardless of how important there are (there are many open problems that are not that important) greatly reduces the probl…
The crux of the argument perhaps. It suggests that too many people are currently studying mathematics without making much progress.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yet the software industry is plowing ahead, reportedly pushing mountains of unreviewed code to Prod, and the world hasn't ended. Yes, this has gone so well
It really has. All of the places facing an unusually high outage rate are places that have seen huge growth in their service usage (Anthropic, GitHub, etc) which is to be expected. The rest of the world has been happily chugging along with coding agents for almost a year now and things seem to still be working just fine.
That's not true, many of these outages have been directly attributed to AI tooling.
> The rest of the world has been happily chugging along with coding agents for almost a year now and things seem to still be working just fine.
Many more services are now being attacked by AI agents that originate from all kinds of organizations including OpenAI, Anthropic, and many others. Unless you're purposefully being obtuse, I would not call that "working just fine".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another historical analogy: this is kind of like the transition from alchemy to chemistry.
Interesting analogy