861–870 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans still have brains (and thus human intellect) even in the presence of AI... Even today, people make varying use of their brains.
But what use will be their brains to others if a machine can do the thinking instead for a fraction of cost?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of people still make bad music that other people still manage to enjoy (a lot of it has gone multi-platinum!) even though they're not Mozart or Bach.
This would be valid if we didn’t live in under capitalism, which reduces the way we spend our time down to dollars and cents.
There's an unpopular branch of mathematics which does not have infinities - finiteism.[1] The constructive version of finitism takes the position that there is no such thing as infinity, just arbitrarily large upper bounds. You can have theorems about arbitrarily large numbers, but you never get 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 ... = 2 The benefit of finitism is that it escapes undecidability. The big objection to finiteism is th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your point is largely addressed in the article, did you try reading it? "In many fields and activities, years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas. However, building on a vast body of previous human work, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of producing the results of such wo…
Different person here, I read the article and they are all wrong. Hope that helps. Okay, to elaborate, substantively, their point is that the people using these AI models are not doing it for the love of the game, but for marketing. And instead of them - and nobody - spending millions of dollars to solve the problem, successfully, they want every problem of their academic industry to persist because even though they…
I would recommend a bit more humility and trying to better understand why 25 Fields medalists, among them people like Terence Tao (who isn't anti-AI by any means, he's even promoted a registry of AI Lean proofs), are saying this.
> Okay, to elaborate, substantively, their point is that the people using these AI models are not doing it for the love of the game, but for marketing.
No. The point is that AI companies are using the models to solve problems in such a way that the useful part of problem-solving, i.e. the theories and tools developed during the process, is not present. And they are doing that because the companies seem to be motivated not by honest advancement of math but by marketing and publicity.
> they synthesize and solve lots of other problems nobody asked for.
No one asked Fourier to solve series representation of functions when he was studying the heat equation, and yet thanks to that we have Fourier analysis.
> if they want to remain relevant as academics and mathematicians, they need to learn how to replicate the proofs and the steps that alluded humans for decades
The point they are making is that if AI keeps being used as "problem solver" rather than "theory understanding", replicating the proofs and getting the useful parts out of them will be far more difficult.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> his prose is directly implying that evil superintelligent AIs are deliberately writing obscure proofs in order to harm the community of human mathematicians That is probably the wildest misinterpretation of sth I have ever read here. Misalignment is used as in the goals and interests of ai COMPANIES are not the same as the ones of the mathematical community. It is very proper use of the word, and if anything imo th…
The point stands whether you attribute agency to AIs themselves or to AI companies. The companies are not deliberately sabotaging human mathematical understanding by writing up purposely inscrutable results, either (which is what the word 'misalignment' would imply in this context): they are merely working with frontier tools that have a very limited capability for human-like understanding. It's left to human mathema…
The entire point of the paperclip maximiser is the AI isn't evil. It isn't trying to hurt humans. It just doesn't care about us.
Nobody claims OpenAI and Anthropic are out to torpedo mathematics. Just that relative to their internal goals of getting publicity ahead of IPOs by winning awards, what happens to mathematics and mathemeticians in the long run isn't a real concern.
The Holocene [1] features relatively few species humans set out to eradicate. We mostly realised something had gone extinct after we accidentally destroyed them. That is what originally misalignment meant in respect of AI.
>We candlemakers are suffering from the unfair competition of a foreign rival. This foreign manufacturer of light has such an advantage over us that he floods our domestic markets with his product. And he offers it at a fantastically low price. The moment this foreigner appears in our country, all our customers desert us and turn to him. As a result, an entire domestic industry is rendered completely stagnant. And even more, since the lighting industry has countless ramifications with other native industries, they, too, are injured. This foreign manufacturer who competes against us without mercy is none other than the sun itself!
>Here is our petition: Please pass a law ordering the closing of all windows, skylights, shutters, curtains, and blinds... https://fee.org/articles/the-candlemakers-petition/
It reminds me of Frédéric Bastiat's Candle Makers' Petition. It satirised protectionism in the 1800s: >We candlemakers are suffering from the unfair competition of a foreign rival. This foreign manufacturer of light has such an advantage over us that he floods our domestic markets with his product. And he offers it at a fantastically low price. The moment this foreigner appears in our country, all our customers des…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you aware that Tao is among the largest proponents of using AI in mathematics? The usage itself is not the point here.
Tao doesn't go as far as Baudelaire, but there are some similarities. In particular, Tao has criticized that AI is not being used to create new interesting conjectures, and that the rush to prove old conjectures is not giving human mathematicians enough time to carefully analyze and understand the proofs and the methods used in those proofs. My answer to both is the same: nothing stops mathematicians from doing both…
> nothing stops mathematicians from doing both of those things
Actually yes, and they explain that pretty clearly in the letter. These problems have been used as "goals" not because the solutions are necessarily worth it, but because they set a clear direction whose process would probably yield very useful theories, and also more conjectures and problems. If the goals get solved by AI models that do not generate comprehension, then the direction gets less clear, it's harder to collaborate and get funding (think what would be easier, to get funding to try and solve Navier-Stokes or to try and understand an already proven Navier-Stokes?), and we get less open problems to work on.
another story about the lack of chain-of-thought reasoning traces in frontier models...
I get that mathematicians and other academics have their social structure and mechanism to create social hierarchies but those aren't very important to interest of general population that funds them.
If the process of making sense of the results, finding structure that humans can understand and writing explanations that allows for wider understanding is valuable it will still be valuable and there will be need for people able to provide it. If it makes higher mathematics accessible to more people then it's even better. I am hope they will not manage to sacrifice that for the sake of their little society in society.