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A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

731–740 of 1001 posts

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But there's still play. There's still curiosity. And there's still the drive to understand something for yourself. Yes, but think about what that implies if those are the only motivations left. Gone are the professions. Gone are the ambitious. There is plenty of space for people to work on intellectual pleasure pursuits (as there is with art and music), but the death of all intellectual based industries is still so…

Good? Those people were in the field for the wrong reasons. No reason to mourn them leaving

> in the field for the wrong reasons

It’s an interesting view-point. What are the “right reasons” to pursue an intellectual discipline? To selflessly further the total sum of knowledge?

> No reason to mourn them leaving

What field? Who’s leaving?

The conclusion has to be that human involvement in these pursuits is facing existential crisis. “Teach me, oh Oracle, the mysteries of the Universe”. “For a fee”.

Both the glory and joy of discovery now belongs to the machines (the owners of those machines). Perhaps that’s fine and well, but I read Anathem and feel the strong yearning to be the intellectual monk. And yes, to fight and debate and think; and obtain my place in history. The history of man.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#732
post #158
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At issue is the fact that it doesn't typically work like: mathematician produces a proof in isolation, generates a PDF, and shares it with a bunch of people. There's a whole culture and community going on behind the scenes with conferences, seminars, lectures, chats in the hallway, advising students, etc. that AI-generated proofs bypass.

I don't think that AI would disrupt any of that. Even if AI solves a problem, you can still discuss the methods at conferences, seminars, lectures, chats in the hallway, advising students, etc.

Hopefully that's true. Instead of bypassing the community maybe it stimulates the community. I think it does disrupt things a bit, but I'm optimistic at the moment!

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#733
post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is only true up until a point. If I treat a mid-sized model (say, Qwen3.8 Flash Next) like a pair programmer, then yes, it accelerates my work. But I can already see the next stage with Fable: If I give it a couple of paragraphs of spec and $50, then I can just leave…

Of course you're not going to get rich with the kind of software that LLMs can one shot these days. But that kind of software like to-do lists or basic CRUD have been saturated for over a decade, way before LLMs. People overestimate how much you can one shot, yeah a good prompt can get you 90% there but that 10% remaining often takes months of extra work. Software has always progressed this way, lots of devs back the…

But what does the human researcher do in this future?

If they are not needed to understand the result, then what's their role? Asking the right questions? But how will they know what questions to ask if they don't have a deep understanding of the domain earned by sweating the details themselves?

And how long will they be needed to ask the right questions, how long until AI can do that too?

> Software has always progressed this way

These platforms took on the order of a decade to mature, during which people had plenty of time to learn what's next. With LLMs we went from one-shotting functions in 2025 to entire projects just over a year later.

What do you think you will be working on in a decade?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#734

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 be…

That’s a charitable way to interpret what they’re trying to do in this letter. I would say they are trying to maintain the status quo to protect their status system.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 optimizat…

> We should never have built machines with agency...

We haven't quite crossed that bridge, but we do appear to be standing on it.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#736
post #627

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 commented something similar on a bunch of other posts. The thing that scares me about a lot of the AI community in general is that their utopia is basically more frightening to me than their doom scenarios. They present this "incredible abundance" as the ultimate human endgame, but I agree, when we all end up like the humans in Wall-E, what's the purpose of it all? And then to get retorts of "it's just just rich te…

Probably the opposite of Wall-E utopia, AI will keep us busy. For one - we are becoming harder to differentiate, competence is hidden deep and surface signals don't carry anymore. Niches and specializations feel threatened by imitation. This means everyone is frantically searching for their own corner, musical chairs. This holds for both people and companies.

Second - every time we learned to transmit better from past experience we saw massive expansion in culture and economy, not shrinking. Writing, printing, computers, internet and AI are just gradations on the scale of transmission from past experience. Everything stands on this transmitted experience.

My analogy to the body - every cell has the same DNA (every human has the same AIs, culture and tools), but they express it differently depending on context. And no one cell is too fat, the organism distributes work and energy. AI won't make anyone too rich. Its wealth is distributed in the system.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#737
post #627

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 commented something similar on a bunch of other posts. The thing that scares me about a lot of the AI community in general is that their utopia is basically more frightening to me than their doom scenarios. They present this "incredible abundance" as the ultimate human endgame, but I agree, when we all end up like the humans in Wall-E, what's the purpose of it all? And then to get retorts of "it's just just rich te…

100% agree, their utopia sounds far worse than their “humans will go extinct” which still sounds implausible to me. I would rather die than live in a WallE society, and I hate that they’re getting trillions trying to force us there

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#738
post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 resu…

This has always happened, way before AI. You'd spend months or years building and growing your business, and then Google would release a feature or product that would kill your business overnight because they can throw way more money at the problem, plus their branding. That's life.

But you're talking about business, where competition has always been expected. OP is talking about mathematical research, which has stood on hundreds of years of cultural tradition driven by human individuals sharing ideas, collaborating, building on each others' work, all for the benefit of humanity.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The maths community is now in the antithesis phase, synthesis will take a while ;) Lee Sedol said in an interview that "losing to AI, in a sense, meant my entire world was collapsing. ... I could no longer enjoy the game. So I retired", and I think there will be folks in the mathematical community who would feel the same when the solutions pages to hard problems are suddenly available. But on the other hand, people l…

I really hate this overly condescending takes. First of all, what do you know about the internals of math research that allows you to speak with so much confidence. Second, you're not even addressing the issues raised by the letter! This is not about "oh they made a bunch of problems easier". There are huge economical interest behind: who owns and has access to models? are these companies interested in developing res…

>> "are these companies interested in developing research" judging from the money, resources spent and the value they derive from this the answer is very definitively yes.

What makes you think these companies (and I'm not a fan of all their motives) are not interested in developing research? The motives may be self-serving, but it is undoubtedly and objectively accelerating research.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#740
>> Famous problems have often served as landmarks and lighthouses against which one can measure an improved understanding of this landscape. Solving one of these problems has been a certain sign of new insights and interesting methods, which would then be studied by a community of mathematicians, through a long and arduous process of talks, discussions, simplifications. At the end of this process, one will ideally find a textbook presentation of the results suitable for any graduate or even undergraduate student to study.

Doesn't the same apply to art and literature, philosophy and political science? Don't we (in the study of music or art) have the same sequence of struggle for new solutions, a study of which things worked or failed and why, what they could impart to our science, and the necessity of passing on both process and derived conclusions to the next geveration, so that they can refine upon what's been learned? Art and literature are less often considered forms of "problem solving" than math or physica, but they are probably more crucial ways in which groups of humans solve large problems for their own survival... like math problems which are too complex for any one person to fully understand.

First they came for the artists and writers. Then they came for creative coders and engineers. Now they're coming for mathematicians and now you understand why it's a problem to deprive a generation of the right to conceive and sketch ideas which fail and to struggle and work out solutions for themselves?

Who will want to be a mathematician? Or an artist or a poet or a musician, in this world? What will consuming ideas and media even mean when they're totally remashed versions of things people don't understand the references to, and when the consumer themself has zero knowledge of prior art to give them the ability to discriminate between creative license, fact, and fiction?

Without evolving art or literature, stuck in a dead loop of culture, mathematics is a dead letter anyway. Because even if you do produce something miraculous and brilliant, it will be instantly absorbed and no one will ever understand it.

Gradient descent got us into this mess..which shows how lazy people have become. Gradient descent should not really be able to solve anything new. People want candy. Mathematicians should focus on finding a way out of the current problem. I'm not a mathematician, I'm an artist and coder and musician. I already have to deal with daily requests to "fix" terribly written AI code and so-called art. Now it's your turn. My guess is that there's likely some kind of quantum proof of work that evades LLM manufacture, that we profit from as creatures who survive in our Everett verse. Go find the way to reduce that so we can rid ourselves of this scourge.

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