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A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

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Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#891

Post by int_19h »

sdeframond wrote: post #160
imdsm wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am on this track too. If AI leads to advancements, objectively that's a positive (depending on the advancement I guess) but it's only when mathematicians realise they'll get beaten to every thing now that they're outraged.

Say AI becomes the best at everything. Best at chess/go, best at maths, philosophy, economics, romantic advices ... and so on. Then what's the point of thinking by oneself? Of talking to one another? What's the point of being human if we dont do human things but entirely rely on AI? I believe this is more or less these mathematicians' argument.

> Then what's the point of thinking by oneself?

It's fun.

> Of talking to one another?

It's fun.

> What's the point of being human if we dont do human things but entirely rely on AI?

It's fun.

Well, it's not fun today because most of us have to spend most of our waking hours working some bullshit job for a living. But imagine that there's no bullshit job?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#892

Post by int_19h »

sdeframond wrote: post #766
cute_boi wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that th…

Who is "we" ? Because if you dont need to employ a human, then who needs your services? If nobody needs anybody, what are we? (Edit: assuming you are human)

This only makes sense if you assume that the value of humans to other humans is solely their economic output.

Which is certainly how our society is structured, but, does it have to be? Can we admit that we basically have a developmental trauma as a species and learn to live the sake of living, instead of for the sake of being "useful"?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#893

Post by int_19h »

tonfa wrote: post #207
pfdietz wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other news, evangelical christians ask scientists to stop publishing about evolution. We apparently have a moral obligation to protect existing power structures? Tao should maybe consider there are people who are indifferent to, or actively want to tear down, his institutions; why should they cooperate in preserving them? Whatever happens has to be resilient in the face of defection; any scheme where everyone is e…

> In other news, evangelical christians ask scientists to stop publishing about evolution. not sure it's comparable, but the issue is that for a lot of those mathematical results, they don't really have utility by themselves. The utility is the new branches/understanding that's being developped.

If that was all there is to it, there wouldn't be a problem - the results don't have utility by themselves so they can just be ignored.

So, why can't they just be ignored?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#894

Post by int_19h »

throwaway1921 wrote: post #204
piloto_ciego wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how I read it too, Terry Tao, who has been a "pro-AI math guy" is going through the same emotions and confusion that us SWE folks are going through, "oh, wait... this might mean I'm not going to be special anymore!?" I don't mean to be a dick, but I've talked about it previously. These folks are grieving. I get it, I've lived through this sort of life changing thing before, it sucks... but yeah.

I think this is ridiculously flippant. If software engineering and the hardest math is solved, that means that eventually a majority of professions and knowledge work is solved. This is hugely problematic because of the way our society currently functions. People need jobs to eat, pay for housing, etc. Dismissing it as "innovations have happened before" is disingenuous. Yes, innovations have happened, but none of tho…

> that means that eventually a majority of professions and knowledge work is solved. This is hugely problematic because of the way our society currently functions.

Our society has functioned very differently in the past, precisely because the technology level made some things viable (or profitable) that aren't so anymore.

One would hope that, rather than abandoning technological progress, we'll rather adjust our society to it.

I mean, seriously, read what you just wrote. You're literally saying that solving scarcity is a problem because of the way our society currently functions - because people "need jobs to eat, pay for housing, etc". And you're correct! But what does it tell you about our society that robots capable of producing everything that humans might need is a problem for it?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#895

Post by achierius »

grey-area wrote: post #835
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I’m no big AI cheerleader, but why don’t you try these models to see what they offer - they might suggest some things you haven’t thought of, or save you some time in your research. One reason not to try is to create an air gap between the OP's ideas and the data that future models can train on. We saw that the mathematicians who trusted OpenAI and Anthropic with their preliminary work found the rug pulled out of…

Unless you’re very weak-willed, I wouldn’t worry about independence. LLMs make mistakes all the time, they are nothing like an all-knowing oracle nor are they going to replace humans despite the absurd fantasies of LLM fans and those with a vested interest. Plagiarism is an interesting point, though honestly I think it would be fairly easy to work out who had published similar research if the LLM gives you an idea -…

> despite the absurd fantasies of LLM fans

Absurd fantasies like solving a Millennium Prize Problem? How is this not prima facie absurd? And if that's come to pass, why should we believe your bar for anything else?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#896

Post by NateEag »

contubernio wrote: post #784
NateEag wrote: post #459

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…

"I suspect that with six good mathematicians spending their whole careers primarily focused on it, and working together closely, Navier-Stokes might well have fallen already" There were more than six doing that and it's essentially why it was ripe for AI to finish it off. But the finishing off was quicker than anyone expected

I'm not a mathematician, nor do I know almost anything about the discipline, but it sounds like maybe you do.

What teams of people spent an entire career working together, focused entirely on Navier-Stokes or problems they suspected were related, without any "publish or perish" concerns?

I realize tenure is a thing, but my limited understanding is that a significant amount of time is spent earning it, once you account for Ph.D. program and the years of needed to be granted it.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#897

Post by pks016 »

wanderingmind wrote: post #820
pks016 wrote: 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…

Newsflash. Most graduate research is worth nothing. If this helps graduate students to re-evaluate and start doing things that can generate income while being intellectually stimulating, it's a net win for the person and the economy

I mean it is. Most of the time in graduate school, you're getting trained and learning to do reasearch. People rarely produce great work during graduate school. Only towards the end of their degree or start of new position (post doc, independent researcher, or assistant professor), you start seeing good work. And for a professor, most of their research is done by graduate students.

Academia has it's own sets of big problems. Before this AI boom also, most people graduating never stayed in academia. The way graduate schools are structured, I would be happy if few people joined. That would also mean we lose good researchers in a long run.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#898

Post by tehjoker »

looofooo0 wrote: post #886
40four wrote: post #883

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see why the two are mutually exclusive to be honest. I’m not a mathematician, but I’m a software engineer and whether I like it or not, AI has changed my field dramatically forever. I understand the distaste for the way AI might be affecting the field of mathematics, but the genie is out of the bottle, and it will never be the same. It just took a little longer for it to hit the math community. Software engin…

Soon AI mathematics will be 10x or 100x or 1000x more productive than humans in the proofing theorems business. Mathematics of old style is dead, they should develop ideas how to deal with that as a math community.

If a human doesn't understand the proof, it might be useful for certain kinds of engineering, but not really that useful for mathematics except as an existence test.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#899

Post by int_19h »

ex-aws-dude wrote: post #767
marsten wrote: post #761

Math is likely moving into a big science era, much like experimental particle physics and astronomy did before it. Once AI mines the easy unsolved problems, it will take large token budgets to make meaningful advances. That will need to be funded and planned at a societal level, like the great facilities of the other big sciences. Mathematics will become more like an observational science, with some mathematicians sp…

That’s something I don’t see much discussion about They spent millions to solve this problem but it’s not like someone is going to pay that for every problem Won’t progress still be limited financially?

Progress is fundamentally limited not by finances (which are a human abstraction) but by the energy budget and how much can be extracted from it. This has always been the case, really, although it's unusually blunt in case of AI since compute mostly needs cheap power.

There's a separate question of who controls how much energy, and can therefore decide where it's spent. This isn't an inherent limitation to progress, though - it's an imaginary limitation that exists in our minds, a collective delusion, if you will. There's no law of physics that says Sam Altman gets to decide; we as a society choose to respect the property rights that translate to his economic (and attendant political) power to do so. We could choose to stop respecting them, and if we do so collectively, there's nothing they can do about it.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#900

Post by int_19h »

ambicapter wrote: post #93
johnnyApplePRNG wrote: post #14

The average programmer is outraged by OpenAI's methods, too. I don't care how good Astra or any subsequent models they may release might be... I am never going back to those token reset shenanigans.

What are the token reset shenanigans?

https://codex-resets.com
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