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A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

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Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#851

Post by adastra22 »

vector_spaces wrote: post #371
adastra22 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanity is better off for knowing these proofs. This strikes me as academic NIMBYism.

Do you "know", in any meaningful sense, any of OpenAI's recently publicized proofs? Do you suppose that there is any large community of non-academics that does? One of the points the parent makes, along with the TFA, is that academia -- or more specifically, the "mathematical community"-- is a setting primarily for creating and ingesting mathematical knowledge, and disseminating it to the next generation and to other…

Why/how do you think I used academic as a slur here?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#852

Post by NateEag »

caaqil wrote: post #208

The mathematicians would be wise to re-read The Bitter Lesson , maybe twice a day, until it sinks in. No offense and with all due respect to the Ivory Tower Giants but the whole "oh no you ruined the game because you solved it, I was supposed to play with that in child-like wonder manner and take several years to do so, and by then I would have showed you all the trickery I did to get there and maybe that will be use…

You would be wise to take the time to understand a perspective other than your own.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#853

Post by Turfie »

I was watching a talk by Terence Tao a couple of days ago, and I noticed a shift in his attitude towards AI. His enthusiasm seemed to have waned; he was becoming more dismissive of it, and I was wondering why.

“A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics,” with a list of important mathematicians.

This post makes it clear that, to put it bluntly, they’re psychologically butt-hurt.

They talk about misalignment, but this revolution is a massive step forward in the advancement of mathematics. Everyone has access; everyone can collaborate.

Yes, “plagiarism and attribution” are current-day problems for them. But guess what? Those were stupid things to concern oneself with anyway if your real goal is to advance mathematics and the spreading of it.

This whole post kind of reads like their egos being butt-hurt.

There are tons of developers who published open-source code that made all of this possible without any attribution. And that is indeed the future we must inevitably head towards, if one’s ego would allow it, that is, and if one is properly “aligned” with the right goals.

I envision us all collectively talking to a centralized and open AI. This would really ignite human sharing and collaboration.

It is indeed problematic that currently it’s in the hands of some companies, while it should be a public good.

I hope this progression will eventually, finally, trigger the real solution to all of our problems: true global cooperation, global politics, and genuine collaboration as a human species.

But I hold my heart, because if even these mathematicians have misaligned egos, then what’s to be expected of the rest of the decision-makers?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#854

Post by nlarion »

I saw the most recent fireship video and I've biased my opinion already on the topic. But I was biased even before that having been a human. To the point: this is a knee jerk reaction to AI entering mathematics. AND more importantly openai just did I mathematics dirty, true or false the perception is there. I completely understand the gripe, I'm a dev so welcome to the shitshow. I think the better more pragmatic approach is to embrace our ai overloads and reach far beyond your grasp at the strange and weird corners of thought and tame it with ai. These guys are basically chimps being handed an ak47, use it.

*Edit word choice

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#855

Post by robotpepi »

david-gpu wrote: post #596
shimman wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there's a meaningful analogy. The poster wants to make Tao sound unreasonable and against "progress" while ignoring the very real concerns Tao has. It's what fanatics do when they want to enforce their view on the world, they have to attack anyone with a reasonable viewpoint because they can't imagine a world where someone tells them they don't like what they're doing.

I do not want to make him sound unreasonable. He is a brilliant man. But I also think that he is a bit shell shocked, much like other luminaries in the past have been when confronted with rapid technological development, so I wanted to highlight some historical similarities, imperfect as they can only be. As for the rest of your comment, I hope you have a great day.

> But I also think that he is a bit shell shocked, much like other luminaries in the past have been when confronted with rapid technological development

You're locked into that idea, but provide no real argument. The dangers they describe in the letter are real.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#856

Post by zozbot234 »

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".

Because his letter misuses the word "misalignment" for what's very clearly a capability gap. To anyone familiar with that sort of language, his prose is directly implying that evil superintelligent AIs are deliberately writing obscure proofs in order to harm the community of human mathematicians, which is exactly what the AI-hating Luddite would say! The reality is closer to "current frontier AIs are clueless about what makes mathematical problems/proofs interesting to humans" which is a vastly different issue.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#857

Post by NateEag »

onetimeusename wrote: post #751
NateEag wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangent: > From my memory I think they said it took 88 hours to solve a Millenium Problem versus the decades of time humans have put into it. Keep in mind those ~88 hours were spread across ~10,000 simultaneous agent instances. So, roughly 880,000 hours of compute. Assuming a fifty-year career, and forty-hour workweeks, a human mathematician's career is about 100,000 hours of "compute". I suspect that with six good m…

ok I realize this is a tangent but you're saying my post is very misleading and then also saying that a human mathematician's career is about 100,000 hours of compute and that Navier-Stokes could've had a solution by now if not for perverse incentives. You may be right but I don't think this is a great argument because in a year I would bet that those numbers change since computing power tends to increase or get chea…

I wasn't trying to say that genAI won't beat humans. It arguably already has, much as that may fill me with horror and revulsion.

I'm just trying to point out that economically, we have not yet reached the point where AI mathematics research is a no-brainer hands-down win, no consideration required.

It might already be a win, and certainly the ability to compress those 900,000 hours of effort into an actual week of linear time is mind-boggling and potentially a huge game-changer for all kinds of open research questions.

It's not obvious that human math research is dead yet.

Maybe soon, but not yet.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#858

Post by noisy_boy »

We have an intellectual structure that has been largely the same irrespective of the level of technological advancement. The brightest among us think about hard problems. Even though all of us may not understand those advances, we all appreciate and celebrate them to varying degrees. Those who are able to comprehend have time to absorb, generate more discussion. In time, we honor those achievements that withstand the test of time or make big enough impact on the advancement of knowledge and/or society.

The process is as much a human experience as is the result. If we have dime-a-dozen results like this minus the process, where does our intellectual structure stand? We will just be a hierarchy of priests at the altar of the machine?

PS: Before someone comes up with an counter example of maths before and after calculators, that was a tool that accelerated the steps. This is replacing the brain.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#859

Post by Koffiepoeder »

Turfie wrote: post #853

I was watching a talk by Terence Tao a couple of days ago, and I noticed a shift in his attitude towards AI. His enthusiasm seemed to have waned; he was becoming more dismissive of it, and I was wondering why. “A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics,” with a list of important mathematicians. This post makes it clear that, to put it bluntly, they’re psychologically butt-hurt. They talk about misalignment, but this…

I think their point is more on the fact that just proving something is only half the work. Intermediate results and proofs are often also of immense value. Right now the output is sloppy proofs and LEAN code. This is useful, but a large part of the effort still lies ahead. And if you are a mathematician you'd rather be working on hard problems than fixing slop.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#860

Post by reasonableklout »

rester324 wrote: post #814
gpt5 wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

We can look at the past and wish we were more clear-eyed about what was happening, just as we can look to the present and ask that we have more empathy for each other going forward. But I don't think it helps anybody to blame the mathematics community for not organizing until they were directly impacted. This is a tidal wave that has caught everyone off guard in <3 years.
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