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A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

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Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#781

Post by latent-person »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #548
latent-person wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you are right, some people do watch chess engines play. TCEC (Top Chess Engine Championship) [1] streams them. Popular chess YouTubers goes over engine games from time to time too. [1] https://tcec-chess.com/

That's not proof of interest so much as proof of commerce. It could easily be a money-laundering mechanism. Mostly nobody cares about professional chess. The number of people who are actually interested in today's game and not the drama are a tiny sliver of that. This is actually great because it means we can train and evaluate both without interference from chess players, possibly even building a stable society.

Here [1] is a video made 3 months ago going over an engine vs an engine made by of one of the big YouTubers, which has 1.4m views. Enough proof?

[1]https://youtu.be/Ov7K4W-zAk0?is=6jVBkQpn8xbaA2Tz

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#782

Post by tmhn2 »

evenhash wrote: post #729
amelius wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if it's lean-verified.

"Lean-verified" is not some magical incantation that makes a supposed proof irrefutable. Even disregarding potential bugs in the kernel as others have said. Say that AI gives you a Lean proof and says it proves Theorem X . It could just as easily give you the same proof but claim that it proves (not X ). How would you know the difference? Nothing can really be considered proven unless a human expert can read the Lean…

I'm not totally sure what you mean. You can validate the proof using lean, which is what it's for--the whole magic of it is you don't have to just trust what AI says. That said, to your larger point, there are loopholes, and we'd certainly better be able to read the statement in lean, etc.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#783

Post by pks016 »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #705
octoberfranklin wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This story's comments are heavily astroturfed. Just compare with the comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639408

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…

Sort of, yeah. We are seeing more people commenting who have anti-AI sentiments or in the fence on the topic of AI usage.

On why some people are making emotionally charged claims, my guess: This affects the core belief of what is right or wrong, Impressions based on past doings of OpenAI, losing trust for OpenAI based on sequence of events.

I don't think we will get to see any clear evidence. I'm not even sure what would be the evidence. I would be surprised if OpenAI comes out clean if they have made a mistake. They move on to the next shiny thing.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#784

Post by pks016 »

teravor wrote: post #700
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. should they not be deterred? we stumbled into a way of brute forcing intelligence with gradient descent.

Well, who watches the watcher?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#785

Post by JoshTriplett »

robotpepi wrote: post #447
Bourget wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's worth anything: I have a PhD in (theoretical) mathematics and I entirely stand by stabbles' comment. There is a real, undeniable possibility of AI becoming better at mathematics in the same way that it became better at chess and Go, and in such a scenario, one may expect the community's response to be comparable.

It makes no sense to compare mathematics with chess. Chess is a sport. No one is interested in watching two machines compete. Chess doesn't have a practical impact. Etc. What you seem to suggest is that AI will be able to completely (or at least in a great part) replace mathematicians. It could be the case in the future, but no one knows right now, and more importantly: tech companies don't even think about it! they…

> What you seem to suggest is that AI will be able to completely (or at least in a great part) replace mathematicians.

There is no bound on the amibitions of AI. AI is set to replace anything done by people, and there won't be any room left for people. There isn't any task done by humans that AI won't be better at.

This is not a tenable outcome.

We should never have built machines with agency, rather than optimization processes that operate as subroutines of humans.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#786

Post by [deleted] »

qlte wrote: post #775
GPerson wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s frustrating that this comment is at the top because it, along with lots of the replies it inspired, absolutely misrepresents the actual declaration. The declaration is not making any statements about not using any AI in mathematics. The entire point is to push the use of the technology in a direction which is compatible with positive pre-existing features of the math community, and to make it better known what s…

It includes Terrance Tao who has made the front page several dozen times at this point for his usage of AI such as to help the community write proofs for Erdos problems. But to many commentors he's a now gatekeeping AI-hating Luddite clinging to a dying profession out of bitterness and envy because his position is more nuanced than "throw AI at everything and turn off your brain".

[deleted]

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#787

Post by bobanrocky »

SavageNoble wrote: post #448
num42 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe mathematics just becomes a little more like other fields--relying on labs with lots of money for compute, digging through a corpus of AI-generated proofs, etc. Dr. Tao said the same thing. Somehow, this letter came through. He wants to conduct Math competitions where participants who don’t have formal credentials can contribute to mathematical research through AI. Title: Terence Tao - SAIR Competitions and the…

I have zero formal math training beyond my Grade 12 Pre-Calculus class. Yet with an LLM I have recently devised an architecture with incredible math potential. Math is a language like any other, and without LLM's I never would have developed the techniques that I have. AI is a tool. It speaks languages I don't (Math, Science, Code). I would love to participate in a Math competition without a hint of any formal advanc…

‘Incredible math potential’ .. Yeah right, your AI said so ?!

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#788

Post by debugnik »

soerxpso wrote: post #404
yzydserd wrote: post #6

> 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.

The existence of solutions to problems does not prevent you from solving the problems yourself anyway, if your goal truly is personal development. You're free to go solve Navier-Stokes yourself right now. You're free to manually do all of the AI work in any field, actually. You won't get grant money or prestige (which are not a part of conceptual understanding and insight) but you will get all of the conceptual under…

Except most people that get actually good at a field do so through their day job. By removing mathematician as a viable job, most can't afford to spend the necessary hours to become a good mathematician at all. We're going back to only rich people or those with a rich patron having a chance of developing themselves.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#789

Post by neosat »

You can couch it different words but the basic shape of all these is the same, whether it was voice artists earlier, IT outsourcing, or now disciplines like mathematics. A small set of people (relatively) who were the primary source of getting something done, suddenly find that technology has made it accessible for others to do what they specialized in. It's a tough pill to swallow and it is natural to not be comfortable with this for most people.

However, as it has happened in the past, once there is a technological wedge, technological advances will move forward, whether some community likes it or not, and human ingenuity will find ways such that the benefit is greater than the risk.

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