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A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

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Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#931

Post by ex-aws-dude »

int_19h wrote: post #899
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

But it’s not like someone is going to expend massive energy without any financial return

These problems are just for marketing for the time being

Maybe the worries of the field of math being “over” are a bit overblown since a lot of pure math these things may discover has no return to the company

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#932

Post by HDThoreaun »

anthonypasq wrote: post #430
matherial wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really tired of these arguments (this and "it's just like calculators"). Photography decimated other forms of visual art, so the concern wasn't wrong. But AI threatens the entirety of human intellectual endeavors . I can make do without oil paintings in my home. I'm not sure I want to live in a future where we make do without brains.

you can still get oil paintings in your house. you just arent willing to pay for actual art

You can import oil paintings from China for very cheap. I’ve got a ton of nice ones

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#933

Post by drdeca »

int_19h wrote: post #880
drdeca wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There ought to be more to life than sitting in a pod receiving sufficient nutrients from a tube, even if there was no doubt that humanity would in this way survive until the sun expands and makes the earth uninhabitable.

> There ought to be more to life than sitting in a pod receiving sufficient nutrients from a tube Even in a hypothetical world where AGI can do everything that humans do better, this would still be a choice to make, not an inevitable consequence for everyone. And life doesn't require suffering to have meaning.

Huh? Why bring up suffering? I was responding to the question of “Why is it a problem if people don’t understand things?” .

I was saying that human pursuit of understanding of things provides value beyond survival and resources.

Joint pursuit of a common goal is a way for people to better be-in-relation-with one-another.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#934

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

int_19h wrote: post #846
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #703

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…

You're basically saying that there's no purpose to it all if there's no human suffering involved, somehow. Why? Is suffering the purpose? What is the goal?

> You're basically saying that there's no purpose to it all if there's no human suffering involved, somehow.

Really? That's what you took from my post? Not enough eye rolls in me for that one.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#935

Post by mpascale00 »

Strilanc wrote: post #234

This letter is complaining that human understanding has been crucial to advancing of mathematics, and AI companies are not bothering with it. But the promise (and horror) of AI mathematics is that, if it succeeds, human understanding becomes irrelevant. That's the goal . So this letter's message will fall on deaf ears. Keep in mind employees at AI companies are publicly stating that they believe they're risking a >10…

I agree insofar as this may fall on deaf ears of AI folks, but that the goals are differ is exactly the point of pointing out misalignment. To talk about this may be more useful for coalescing professional societies than for conversing directly with AI advancers.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#936

Post by larana »

I don't feel nurtured and cared by mathematicians. I mean, it depends, it took me four years to find such professors. When I did, very recently, it felt like fresh air. A couple of good teachers among tenths of egotistical frustrated gatekeepers that humiliate students.

I do see a patient teacher on generative tools. What has keep me trying to learn math has not been mathematicians, but the support of people outside of the field.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#937

Post by erichocean »

mdnahas wrote: post #875

As a consumer of mathematics, I want to attack the author’s idea of “what that work was meant to achieve in the first place”. I do a lot of programming that uses mathematics. I designed the error recovery file format “par2”. I worked as a quantitative trader. What do I want from math? To be able to search math results, understand them, and apply them. But academic mathematicians are so inwardly focused - as these aut…

I've had a similar experience.

LLMs doing math has made math far more accessible to me than it was pre-LLM.

Not just using existing math, but developing new math. (For example, I developed an alternative to NURBS surfaces for geometric kernels using LLMs.)

It's really annoying that anyone, anywhere is talking about halting math progress with AI.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#938

Post by erichocean »

AdamN wrote: post #806
GMoromisato wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a difference between "photography will change art--we need to be ready" and "photography will change art, therefore stop photography." There is no doubt that AI has changed the practice of mathematics, just as it has changed the practice of software engineering (and will soon change almost every intellectual job). Trying to deal with change by saying, "please stop the change" is foolish, IMHO. Mathema…

> I think there's a difference between "photography will change art--we need to be ready" and "photography will change art, therefore stop photography." That wasn't the critique. The statements then were that photographs weren't actually art at all. They were the results of specialists with skills but not 'art'. Yet the photograph as a product was displacing real art in the marketplace.

AI is displacing real mathematicians.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#939

Post by erichocean »

MelonUsk wrote: post #874
tim333 wrote: post #864

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…

This is a straw men argument The petition is about a much broader problem: if we’ll demotivate people from understanding math, vibe math in a rush without making it understandable - math becomes useless Basically with pic generation at least we all understand what is on a pic - some cat or something With math it is trivial to generate a lot of stuff that is half-assed and just gives a plain yes/no but doesn’t get abs…

> vibe math

Ah yes, Lean 4. Famous for how unreliable it is. Absolute slop!

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#940

Post by erichocean »

cagz wrote: post #925

I wish this were a document that clearly described how mathematicians expect AI to behave, rather than how it is misaligned. I can kind of decipher the expectation from the declaration, but it still sounds a bit like "it would be better if AI didn't meddle with mathematics", instead of "we want AI to approach problems like this and that way".

They want the AI labs to stop solving "important" math problems so that humans can do it, on the theory that when AI solves "important" math problems, it robs humans of the opportunity to gain new insights into those problems.

Total horse shit, but that's the essence of it.

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