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A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

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Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#731

Post by munificent »

redox99 wrote: post #683
pks016 wrote: post #665

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.

Why would anyone pay you to do "your" research, when they can just cut out the middle man and ask the AI directly about whatever it is you're thinking about?

So many people who are excited about AI making them more productive are, I think, drastically overestimating how much value they are adding to that process.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#732

Post by jiggawatts »

beambot wrote: post #193
matherial wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really tired of these arguments (this and "it's just like calculators"). Photography decimated other forms of visual art, so the concern wasn't wrong. But AI threatens the entirety of human intellectual endeavors . I can make do without oil paintings in my home. I'm not sure I want to live in a future where we make do without brains.

Humans still have brains (and thus human intellect) even in the presence of AI... Even today, people make varying use of their brains.

But what use will be their brains to others if a machine can do the thinking instead for a fraction of cost?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#733

Post by pseudotensor »

Job protectionism for elite mathematicians under guise of caring about student development. The glory of the super smart math person will need to shift to more creative modes, just like art had to handle photography. Attribution is legitimate issue but should not stall progress as it is easy to address via the same research mechanisms that agents already do.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#734

Post by fc417fc802 »

oliculipolicula wrote: post #722
fc417fc802 wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually feel like it's the other way around. The online discourse over the past ~day or so has seemed unusually irrational to me for a technical audience. Commenters making emotionally charged claims of wrongdoing that appear inconsistent with the published claims without justification of the discrepancies. Granted you might well doubt openai's version of events but there's a general expectation of clear evidence…

I identify as neither mathematician nor "maker of things people want" (coder, hacker, engineer). But having friends who identify as those kinds of professionals, let me make some observations. To use a metaanalogy from chess (once again), mathematicians play the opening game, and builders play the end game. AI is sort of a middleman connecting human understanding to applications. I think there's a Technical argument…

> The engineers have to imagine that it's likely they will now get all their design ideas from the hypothetical future datacenters.

At the current rate of advancement that phase will last, what, all of 6 months if we're lucky?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#735

Post by tomrod »

pseudotensor wrote: post #733

Job protectionism for elite mathematicians under guise of caring about student development. The glory of the super smart math person will need to shift to more creative modes, just like art had to handle photography. Attribution is legitimate issue but should not stall progress as it is easy to address via the same research mechanisms that agents already do.

> Job protectionism for elite mathematicians under guise of caring about student development.

Huh. Weird. This hasn't been my take of mathematicians at all. The dozens I know are quite humble and dedicated to math and the beauty one finds in it.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#736

Post by coderenegade »

dbmikus wrote: post #587
bluecheese452 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it more like it merges the code without a dev reviewing or understanding it?

Pretty close, but IMO not quite. A math proof in and of itself is useless unless either: (A) it furthers human knowledge (B) it gets used in applied sciences, engineering, etc. If you merge and deploy code, you have released a tool that can be used. If you ship a gibberish math proof, it's not useful unless someone else can understand and deploy it to some other means. Now, it's possible AI could understand and make…

Not necessarily. That's the best case scenario, but proofs can be intrinsically useful in and of themselves. It's just that for problems of that nature, speculative work is often done ahead of time, e.g. the body of work that already exists assuming the Riemann hypothesis is true.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#737

Post by timcobb »

kibwen wrote: post #691
timcobb wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does success look like?

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, timcobb—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless^W not also subscribed to ChatGPT. If you want a pictur…

> Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory

If only though, because:

> There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#738

Post by myng111 »

pks016 wrote: post #665

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 really resonates with me. I'm early in my PhD and I'm researching a niche form of data compression and IC design. I don't use any AI at all in my research, I do it the super old fashioned way, I read papers cover to cover and sections of textbooks to familiarise myself with the field.

I genuinely enjoy doing this, it's really fun to think critically about what an author wrote or how a particular approach works.

But it does make you wonder, why bother? Probably a frontier model could one shot my algorithm in a day or less. It's incredibly depressing. At least I'm not forced to use it now, but I fear I will have no choice after I join academia or industry in the future.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#739

Post by Animats »

This is a PR problem, not a mathematical problem. It's possibly the worst PR problem mathematics has faced since the execution of Hippasus for whistleblowing on the cover-up of the regular dodecahedron. It's still a PR problem.

So what went wrong? Mathematics education. Math below grad school is all about solving stated problems. Credit is given for solving puzzles successfully. Homework is problem sets. Everybody below a very advanced level is taught math that way. Even at the higher levels, puzzles remain important. Awards in mathematics are often tied to solving puzzle-like problems. That's still the criterion for becoming Senior Wrangler at Cambridge, "the greatest intellectual achievement attainable in Britain". This despite Polya's attempt at reform a century ago. Puzzle solving gets good grades and class rank. So it's the status indicator mathematics presents to the outside world.

Then reasonably good AI comes along. AI has become rather good at solving puzzles. So people aim powerful AIs at known hard puzzles, with some success. That blows up the status indicator system. Mathematics itself is fine. It's the status symbols that have a problem.

Maybe the Fields Medalists need to hire a crisis management team to reframe what success means in mathematics. That's what they're trying to do with that letter, but they're mathematicians, not PR people, and they don't know how.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#740

Post by ls612 »

Creamsicle47 wrote: post #709
ls612 wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. 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 n…

So far for most organizations and services other than the ones I mentioned reliability has been the same this year as it was before. So I call that "working just fine".
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