Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

811–820 of 832 posts

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#811

Post by redox99 »

reasonableklout wrote: post #795
redox99 wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 progr…

I think it will be like how a lot of people know how to code in python but have zero understanding of assembly or how a cpu works. As a researcher you'll accept there's this low level stuff that if you want you can dig into but isn't worth your time, like looking at the generated ASM isn't.

You're exaggerating the LLM progress a bit but yeah progress has been crazy. Yet not much has changed right? We mostly have the same jobs, just code wayyyy more than before because things that wouldn't be worth it now are worth it.

10 years from now I have no fucking idea. But I'm sure in the meantime those who leverage AI will do better than those who yell at a cloud.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#812

Post by vips7L »

demibabs wrote: post #792
nmeagent wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it would be depressing in its own way if this technology just ended up being regulated out of existence.

Why what benefit has it brought? Mass anxiety?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#813

Post by boelboel »

pseudotensor wrote: post #779
sashank_1509 wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can also play that game, You are effectively calling for enabling 24/7 non stop worldwide surveillance of everyone, everywhere all the time. The big difference is my negative is concrete, possible and enabled in 2026 by GPT Astra while you’re talking about some future which we have no idea, we will ever reach.

Easy game. Protecting math jobs limits cancer progress even being a choice of what to pursue. You could choose to allow 24/7 surveillance, but why would you? At least with math progress society can choose what to allow from it, but slowing it down universally blocks all choices.

Lmao this guy thinks people ever decided who/what/how much things should be surveilled.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#814

Post by rester324 »

gpt5 wrote: post #671
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…

I think that the main thing people in this thread are missing, is that it's not about math. AI progression is very likely to affect every single thing humans can do today. Mathematicians are feeling the blow this week, especially as there was wide spread denial in that math community over the capabilities of AI over the last few years, but it's the same problem everywhere.

Well, yeah, while that is true, my impression is that mathematicians (as a community, even though there were outliers) didn't care - not even the slightest - about the impact of LLMs and generative AI, other type of AI and machine learning until it started impacting them. So I have no sympathy for their community at all. They brought all this AI dystopia on us, so they should have voiced their concerns much louder and much much earlier. They should also have shamed their peers who helped these companies much louder and they should have lobbied their institutions and their governments much earlier and much stronger. They should also have protested the direction these companies took at the exact moment when they started using AI for profit.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#815

Post by eru »

tmhn2 wrote: post #804
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…

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…

> the models capable of this work are not always going to be exclusively under the control of those aligned parties.

Yes, the trailing edge will catch up quickly.

I wonder how long until P vs NP falls.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#816

Post by youoy »

causalmodels wrote: post #527
youoy wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have taken care, then share it with the community. People will be thankful and happy. The problem is with people that may do it without contributing to the community.

If this was limited to just three results, I would agree with you. But those three are just the ones I've managed to verify myself. The list of unverified results is quite a bit larger. The field I've been investigating is not large. Even if I were to take the time and care to beat the interesting results into something meaningful, I'm afraid the pace at which I'm able to produce these results would not be well recei…

This all comes down to what we think mathematics is. There are two options here:

Mathematics is just the formal system: in that case we will never be able to beat the AI as humans. The goal is then to cover as much of the formal landscape with AI generated proofs to proof as much statements as possible. Success metrics are lines of lean and numbers of proven statements.

Or

The formal system is just a limited representation of what mathematics is: in that case probably some parts of the formal mathematical landscape are more important than others. Not all statements are born equal. And 90% of AI generated proofs will be just noise. Our job as mathematitians is to steer the AI to high mathematical value regions and turn formal proofs into mathematical proofs and insights.

From my point of view we have know since Godel that we are living in the reality of point 2.

Each of the two points implies a very different way of doing mathematics. So pick the one that you think is true and act accordingly.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#817

Post by eru »

robotpepi wrote: post #413
stabbles wrote: post #251

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…

Who cares about the giant labs? The trailing edge will catch up quickly, and in a year or three you can prove Rieman's hypothesis on your smartphone.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#818

Post by eru »

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…

Well, what you are saying that the situation is even better for math than for chess?

Chess is only valuable as an entertainment. So no one really gains anything from computers becoming really good at chess.

But with math, everyone in the world would gain from computers becoming really, really good at it.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#819

Post by eru »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #785
robotpepi wrote: post #447

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…

You say it like it's a bad thing.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#820

Post by eru »

flatline wrote: post #521
robotpepi wrote: post #447

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…

Does mathematics still have a practical impact without humans in the loop? I don't think there's one single answer to that question, but I think it's worth considering exactly what that impact may be. Tech companies are as much the topic of this post as AI, I think that's the immediacy.

> Does mathematics still have a practical impact without humans in the loop?

There's a single answer to that question: yes, math very much has an impact without humans in the loop.

Math has a lot of applications, and those applications don't care whether eg the new faster matrix multiplication algorithm was found and proven correct by a machine or a meatbag.

Post reply on HN