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A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

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Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#961

Post by bonoboTP »

robotpepi wrote: post #410
stabbles wrote: post #249

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…

> I really hate this overly condescending takes

Sorry, but this is backwards. Mathematicians are the ones coming to the table asking for money from the taxpayer. This is the context we are speaking in. Mathematicians speaking with the taxpayers who fund them. It's not a great strategy to get offended or speak from a high horse. If the taxpayer is not getting it, patiently explain why you think this art project should remain funded at the same level instead of spending it on something else.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#962

Post by kaffekaka »

jezze wrote: post #811

I read what the text says but I still do not understand what the point is they are trying to make. What is it that AI does exactly that they consider to be bad for mathmaticians? I thought that having AI solve prevously unsolved problems would be a good thing. Doesn't that knowledge give them new ideas and tools for them to solve the next big problem?

The tools would come from trying to solve NS, not from knowing it is true/false.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#963

Post by jrowen »

jrowen wrote: post #945
NateEag wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No amount of hand-wringing is going to put the cat back in the bag. Adapt or perish. We can and have put some ugly, hissing, spitting cats into bags, some of which weren't even in one to begin with: * Chattel slavery is illegal, and the vast, vast majority of humans agree it's appalling it ever wasn't. * Food manufacturers in the US are no longer allowed to put highly-dangerous additives to their products and hide…

Thank you for this response, and I will clarify. I would roughly lump all of those into "social issues," whereas I would put "using AI to advance math" under "technological progress." That's why one article likened it to Socrates's fear of the written word. In broad strokes, I would say that once a technology becomes available, no amount of social pressure will stop it from proliferating. If there's a distinction bei…

To expand further, I think it's interesting that both replies to my comments in this thread sort of alluded to the idea that I might be a corporate shill or at best a patsy. I feel like that couldn't be farther from the truth, I walked away from the software industry and corporate world years ago.

Perhaps I'm looking at this from a too zoomed-out or detached perspective. I'm just thinking about the concept of the technology at play and its future impacts regardless of who owns or controls them. But maybe that's naive. In today's connected world you can't separate those things, and I think I'm understanding that a lot of the outrage here is more about the socioeconomic implications of a big corporation suddenly "disrupting" a field that was largely owned by more altruistic academic institutions.

I do still think that the internet, despite largely being owned and controlled by the powers that be, has represented a great shift of power and agency to the individual, and is ultimately a socialist construct, and we will continue to see those changes over time, and that AI is an extension of that.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#964

Post by kaffekaka »

strangeloops85 wrote: post #599
krupan wrote: post #590

I don't know, people. We still really don't know how OpenAI or others are producing these results. It's all very hand wavy and trust-me-bro. How much money/time/compute have they really thrown at these problems? How much human involvement was there? What LLM did they even use? How much regular software was involved? They have given answers to some of those questions but no proof that that's actually what they did. I…

A very important point! In Tristan (NYU prof)’s write up he noted evidence of the OpenAI mathematician team doing a lot of correction and guidance along the way. We are never told about this with openness and clarity. At a minimum, complete disclosure and honesty is needed by the companies and about the precise role of their staff members.

The OpenAI staff kindly corrected the LLMs naive tries at solving NS? Impressive staff I must say.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#965

Post by jrowen »

jrowen wrote: post #963
jrowen wrote: post #945

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this response, and I will clarify. I would roughly lump all of those into "social issues," whereas I would put "using AI to advance math" under "technological progress." That's why one article likened it to Socrates's fear of the written word. In broad strokes, I would say that once a technology becomes available, no amount of social pressure will stop it from proliferating. If there's a distinction bei…

To expand further, I think it's interesting that both replies to my comments in this thread sort of alluded to the idea that I might be a corporate shill or at best a patsy. I feel like that couldn't be farther from the truth, I walked away from the software industry and corporate world years ago. Perhaps I'm looking at this from a too zoomed-out or detached perspective. I'm just thinking about the concept of the tec…

To expand EVEN further, look at the history of the written word. Being a scribe was a high class position in service of the church. The printing press was invented to print the bible. These were the information-theory projects of the hegemonic institutions and propagandists of the day. I don't think anyone today would argue that these developments ultimately benefitted and liberated the people.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#966

Post by bonoboTP »

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…

Academia was already crumbling for various reasons. This just hastens it. The reasons are manifold and will never be acknowledged. There will be a lot of gnashing of teeth, but it was unsustainable anyway. And historically the bloat was a very short period, a few decades only.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#967

Post by qingcharles »

pred_ wrote: post #812
qlte wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

It's the same on Reddit, and if you look up a few comment histories, you'll find that it's mostly /r/singularity users and /r/accelerate posters that are spamming. So I assume that people are just deliberately misreading the letter and trolling here as well, and I wouldn't read too much into it, but on the other hand, if you never had to think about what scientific misconduct looks like, it's harder to see why the be…

They're not deliberately misreading it, they are simply just not reading it and just assuming they know what it says.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#968

Post by jgord »

cc my comment from reddit :

This is true of almost any field - if we have black-box technology that only the AI can understand / fix / augment / extend, then we will lose the ability for humans to learn and understand that tech.

Its similar to outsourcing manufacturing, you lose the ability to manufacture. If you don't exercise a muscle, it atrophies. If some people dont learn to write code [ or do math or write music or books ] the hard slow way, we will lose that deep skill.

If young people don't grapple with hard problems in science, math, economics, creative writing, drawing, music making .. they will not be trained, their cognitive skills will not develop with use. We will have no doctors or engineers or musicians or lawyers in a decade or two.

We don't want to become a race of fatties who never exercise, or dummies who just scroll social media feeds without exercising their minds.

This is real.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#970

Post by momojo »

jgord wrote: post #968

cc my comment from reddit : This is true of almost any field - if we have black-box technology that only the AI can understand / fix / augment / extend, then we will lose the ability for humans to learn and understand that tech. Its similar to outsourcing manufacturing, you lose the ability to manufacture. If you don't exercise a muscle, it atrophies. If some people dont learn to write code [ or do math or write musi…

I don't think this is a perfect analogy, but i think it's closest to the original articles declaration.

I wish they had stayed this as the very first paragraph.

Maybe I'm too stupid to grok the original declaration. Does anyone have a better summation?

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