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Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

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Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#151

Post by squidbeak »

wongarsu wrote: post #35
Spacecosmonaut wrote: post #24

Accelerationists may argue that the eroding of proper attribution and proof verification by humans is a meaningless short term struggle of a dying field. Mathematics seems to be entering an era where human + machine maximizes performance, much like chess in the 1990s. However, imagine a future where even talented mathematicians are nothing but noise in the machine (as is the case in chess now). A future where AI gene…

Much like for many the point of chess is that it's played by humans, with truly superhuman AI relegated to a training aid, mathematics is in many ways about human comprehension. You can use AI to find and proof new theorems. But if you get to the point where humans can't understand it, is it even still math?

> Much like for many the point of chess is that it's played by humans, with truly superhuman AI relegated to a training aid

It's much more than just training. Humans use the engines to prepare openings and find promising novelties. Over time these novelties unearthed by engines fill out theory. It's easy to fine elite games where neither player is out of book for dozens of moves. Modern players are full hybrids in that sense. Looking back at chess, it seems natural that Mathematics will go the same way.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#152

Post by azeirah »

turzmo wrote: post #48

Much of math (or science) research has the strange quality of being mostly curiosity-driven, but having giant benefits that occasionally spin out to the public. Some questions are more urgent and practical. My feeling is that the more directly practical a question is, the more likely the research community is to support AI usage in that question. The annoying thing about recent AI advances is that they target questio…

Do you not think that solutions to erdos problems might end up stepping stones to other important problems?

Either by introducing new tools, or by proving things that were previously unproven that end up helping in unexpected ways?

That's often how math goes, isn't it?

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#153

Post by IshKebab »

silveraxe93 wrote: post #5

> However, the declaration argues math is more than a machine for producing correct answers. There might be more to maths than that, but that is definitely the most important part. I love science funding. But not because it's a jobs program for nerds.

Maths pretty much is a jobs program for nerds though. It occasionally produces results that are practically useful for society but there's absolutely no way the vast majority of today's maths research falls into that category.

There are definitely exceptions, like crypto. I still think it would be pretty silly to stop maths research anyway. And anyway part of the job of maths researchers is to teach maths to undergrads and that's obviously enormously useful to society.

But on the scale of "how useful is this research to society" it's dead last after engineering, chemistry, biology, and physics. Well maybe computer science would be last actually!

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#154

Post by Joel_Mckay »

Spacecosmonaut wrote: post #24

Accelerationists may argue that the eroding of proper attribution and proof verification by humans is a meaningless short term struggle of a dying field. Mathematics seems to be entering an era where human + machine maximizes performance, much like chess in the 1990s. However, imagine a future where even talented mathematicians are nothing but noise in the machine (as is the case in chess now). A future where AI gene…

In general, most researchers already incorporate LLM into their workflows, as it is quite good at context search. However, the relevant training data is based on the collective works of the field of experts. Collecting current data on that work is what makes the LLM sound relevant, and any improvement of the LLM model requires frequent new data from both researchers and the chat bot users themselves. LLM are not real "AI", and anyone that says otherwise is selling people something.

To phrase this differently, LLM companies conduct unauthorized targeted intelligence gathering on peoples work, codify that act of plagiarism or theft as MoE documentation, and sell unaccountable token output to other users.

There is a reason output becomes more nonsensical as "AI" companies try to use dynamic weight granularity and conceptual compaction. It is not necessarily "AI" hallucinations, but rather people fooling themselves into believing smart people are no longer needed if they willingly become a hapless exploited data source caste. This simply isn't true, as people will leave the field for awhile.

The LLM business model regularly requires copyright theft and plagiarism to persist. It will not magically become sentient/AGI/less-stupid, as these algorithms have been operating for over 40 years. What has changed is the scale of the deployment, data pool size, and the energy consumed.

Scientists are still necessary, as they create the world models LLM try to guess at by statistical inference. Hype and FUD ahead of an IPO for a highly dubious revenue company is expected. We look forward to the low cost liquidated GPU hardware in the near future. =3

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#155

Post by seanmcdirmid »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #96
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it. LLMs don't have ego, they don't have the ability to say "no, this should be obvious, I'm not going to explain further", they are just token predictors, and given context, they can generate more tokens. If you don't understand how the answer was derived? You just ask more questions and it isn't going to get bored or annoyed, it will just try to answer the questions. Is that what is offending you so muc…

No, it doesn’t sound like you get it. It has nothing to do with the properties of LLMs and everything to do with the complexity of mathematics. Have you ever been exposed to concepts that are so complex that you feel like you could devote your entire lifetime to trying to understand it and still fall short? It’s a very humbling experience, especially if you have classmates who pick it up effortlessly. Without a human…

> Have you ever been exposed to concepts that are so complex that you feel like you could devote your entire lifetime to trying to understand it and still fall short? It’s a very humbling experience, especially if you have classmates who pick it up effortlessly.

I do have a PhD so I kind of know how that feels. I watched my entire field (PL) get eaten up by AI though, the problems that I thought were huge 10 years ago are just silly footnotes now.

> Without a human holding the reins, consider an LLM a rudderless superboat speeding erratically towards the horizon, finding and proving meaningless theorems that not even your most talented classmate could ever begin to understand.

I don't disagree with that. LLMs are a tool, a super fast pattern matcher, research, token predictor. I don't expect it to go out and define its own esoteric (or useful) problems to pursue without human interaction. That's for the humans to do.

I don't understand what that has to do with my original comment though. I wasn't addressing what problems the LLMs were answering, just how to review and dissect the answers that they would come up with.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#156

Post by tptacek »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #72

Is it possible they feel threatened their jobs are at stake?

Are they? The jobs of programmers are definitely at stake; at any given time there's some fixed amount of software that can be consumed. Mathematics research doesn't have an economic buyer. If you raise the complexity floor for discovery, you reduce the annual productivity of a researcher, but that might not matter to the field.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#157

Post by burnt-resistor »

meindnoch wrote: post #27

Another mathematician already predicted this, but you didn't listen. His name was Theodore Kaczynski. It's time to reap what you've sown.

Like every terrorist wingnut... plausibly correct analysis but insanely wrong, pointless, counterproductive prescription.

PS: I've read his works and they're quite interesting until you get to his insane conclusions that just leap out and away from anything moral, constructive, or feasible.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#158

Post by martin1975 »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #154
Spacecosmonaut wrote: post #24

Accelerationists may argue that the eroding of proper attribution and proof verification by humans is a meaningless short term struggle of a dying field. Mathematics seems to be entering an era where human + machine maximizes performance, much like chess in the 1990s. However, imagine a future where even talented mathematicians are nothing but noise in the machine (as is the case in chess now). A future where AI gene…

In general, most researchers already incorporate LLM into their workflows, as it is quite good at context search. However, the relevant training data is based on the collective works of the field of experts. Collecting current data on that work is what makes the LLM sound relevant, and any improvement of the LLM model requires frequent new data from both researchers and the chat bot users themselves. LLM are not real…

Reading this invoked the image of ouroboros in my mind.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#159

Post by redsocksfan45 »

zerobees wrote: post #115
silveraxe93 wrote: post #5

> However, the declaration argues math is more than a machine for producing correct answers. There might be more to maths than that, but that is definitely the most important part. I love science funding. But not because it's a jobs program for nerds.

Culturally, mathematics is a jobs program for nerds. The field very explicitly takes pride in working on problems that have no obvious applications, and most practitioners are funded publicly or supported by private endowments, with zero pressure to deliver specific results. Of course, this produces useful results every now and then, but it's not like we pursued ruthless efficiency / maximum rate of knowledge advance…

[dead]

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#160

Post by Joel_Mckay »

orbital-decay wrote: post #134
Spacecosmonaut wrote: post #24

Accelerationists may argue that the eroding of proper attribution and proof verification by humans is a meaningless short term struggle of a dying field. Mathematics seems to be entering an era where human + machine maximizes performance, much like chess in the 1990s. However, imagine a future where even talented mathematicians are nothing but noise in the machine (as is the case in chess now). A future where AI gene…

Surely such AI would also be able to reduce and simplify the math for human understanding. Which is what mathematicians do all the time, from turning base 60 cuneiform into modern number systems to simplifying Maxwell's equations for the students.

In general, most humans top out at 3D visualization, and instead rely on crude mathematical tools to work with higher dimensions. Every so often, people like Euler or Leibnitz pops up to give people new methods for blind men with a cane to explore the unseen yet knowable world(s).

Scientific work is not normally naturally statistically salient for LLM observational data inferences. =3

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