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A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

801–810 of 825 posts

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#801

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

#802
>> 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.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pas…

I am truly baffled that you think AI is just one more step on the spectrum of "knowledge transmission" between humans. I think that literally nobody who is an expert on this (both from the perspective of the people creating the technology, and the folks on the safety side warning about the dangers) believes that.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#804
post #200

As a mathematician maybe I am a little more optimistic than this declaration. I am thinking of Mochizuki's abc conjecture: He worked in relative isolation, and dumped a huge incomprehensible proof on the community (to oversimplify a bit). That's not totally unlike what might happen if AI generates a huge, incomprehensible proof of let's say RH. Well, what is the result? In the Mochizuki case, it was a lot of skeptici…

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…

I certainly didn't intend to imply that the declaration is against using AI.

My point is just that I feel a little optimistic that the human culture around math ("ideas we disseminate in talks, private discussions and careful writeups, connecting them to the previous ideas of others" and so on, to quote the declaration) is robust even against relatively irresponsible use of AI (i.e., an onslaught of proof-slop).

And I guess we'd better try to be optimistic, because even if the declaration results in some realignment between the community and big AI companies, the models capable of this work are not always going to be exclusively under the control of those aligned parties.

That said, I think the declaration is great and I support it--let's see what comes out of it.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#805

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…

Do you think that's a good thing, killing science and the desire of humans to participate in scientific understanding?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#806

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…

Indeed. As Nassim Taleb says, "Something bad for the (existing) class of mathematicians as they lose their privilege, but not necessarily bad for mathematics & our body of knowledge?" https://xcancel.com/nntaleb/status/2098498124419305639

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#807
post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that is incredibly depressing

Yep. Perhaps humanity would be better off if we instituted and enforced the notion of "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." It's worth thinking about; just because we can build AI systems doesn't mean we should.

The problem with technology is that the people who have it conquer and kill all the people who don't, essentially ensuring a destructive race to the bottom. You would need a mutual international alliance of nations who not only renounce the technology but also agree to invade anyone who attempts to develop it. Our closest precedent is nuclear weapons, but rather than renouncing them, the US's position is that "only we should have them" and that other people acquiring the same tech they have are valid targets for invasion, and they will obviously apply that notion to any new technology that can be weaponised as well.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#808

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…

> No one is interested in watching two machines compete I’ve watched quite a lot of YouTube videos where two machines compete, so you may not be completely right here

The Square One commentary on the AlphaZero v Stockfish game from 2017 is pretty entertaining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnVDUQksIDk

In other videos he's called out the influence that this and similar games have had on human players in recent years, particularly around square denial and thorn pawn strategies.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#809
post #243

This sounds a lot to me like people in the 90's complaining that computers were destroying chess. Thirty years later, chess is more popular than it ever was, and chess players are better than they ever have been. I wouldn't be surprised if there are now more chess books now than there ever have been. Furthermore, it turns out that a lot of chess books written before computers were just wrong about a lot of things. It…

Many people argue computers were bad for chess till this day and there's good arguments for it.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#810
post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real problem. We're looking at a future where those who control AI have an insurmountable advantage in everything. They can control the amount of intelligence the masses have access to -- for their own safety, of course -- and they will never, ever be able to close the gap.

Say they do. What then? Will people buy from them? What if we decide not to?

At a certain point, you don't have a choice. Before China got into the game, the only way to avoid giving Luxotica money if you wanted a pair of glasses was to essentially not buy glasses. This is the same for many industries -- consolidation behind the scenes.
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