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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

#181

Post by rad_val »

est31 wrote: post #174

One of the reasons why over a decade ago, I dived deeply into the OSS world instead of mathematics was that it was so much more accessible: there were docs for everything, and I got direct feedback when something worked vs when something didn't work. Most of my questions had answers on stack overflow, and once I joined Rust (which back then in 2015 didn't have a big stackoverflow presence) I had a community who answe…

Agreed. As someone who was always curious but had difficulties learning math the way it's taught at the university, AI teaching me the way no professor ever could is a blessing. I fail to see the point of the memo besides: we got here first and we decide what math is because we can. I'm really optimistic about AI and the value it brings in education. Gatekeepers will complain, but ultimately, will either adapt or be left behind.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#182

Post by tz18 »

est31 wrote: post #174

One of the reasons why over a decade ago, I dived deeply into the OSS world instead of mathematics was that it was so much more accessible: there were docs for everything, and I got direct feedback when something worked vs when something didn't work. Most of my questions had answers on stack overflow, and once I joined Rust (which back then in 2015 didn't have a big stackoverflow presence) I had a community who answe…

>AI makes the math world more accessible than before. If you have a question about a proof in the lecture, you can just ask it.

I think that is great, really! but does anyone remember asking a TA or teacher or prof or parent and getting told you can work it out for yourself, or maybe just given a hint? What if that is an essential part of learning, having to work through things you don't understand, but that you have the tools, the foundation, to figure out.

A calculator can't teach you math. A forklift can't build your strength. This is really a double edged sword, as far as education or accessibility goes.

You have to constantly ask... what do I lose by not figuring it out myself?

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#183

Post by rad_val »

overgard wrote: post #177
est31 wrote: post #174

One of the reasons why over a decade ago, I dived deeply into the OSS world instead of mathematics was that it was so much more accessible: there were docs for everything, and I got direct feedback when something worked vs when something didn't work. Most of my questions had answers on stack overflow, and once I joined Rust (which back then in 2015 didn't have a big stackoverflow presence) I had a community who answe…

I imagine the concern is more towards using LLM's to create proofs rather than using them to understand things.

i haven't read their memo, but, the article talks about math being something deeply human and the AI taint. I think it's a bit of both.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#184

Post by jltsiren »

silveraxe93 wrote: post #15
19f191ty wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not the most important part. It can be argued that most important part is asking the right questions

Assume someone solves P=NP Do you think Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin deserve more credit than whoever solved it?

Depends on the solution. If the solution is that P≠NP, the concept of NP-completeness remains the bigger contribution, unless the proof techniques are particularly interesting and lead to other major results. The same applies if P=NP but the proof does not ultimately lead to a practical algorithm. If we get a practical algorithm, the answer is more valuable than the question.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#185

Post by dwroberts »

card_zero wrote: post #85
dwroberts wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably one of the funniest things to read on a site like this, when you consider that eg. Boolean algebra was entirely abstract and had little practical purpose for almost 100 years until Shannon picked it up for use in circuits

Boole was trying to improve logic for humans, "The Laws of Thought". So it has a connection to human problems, and eventually to practical matters. He could instead have been working on something much more abstract and much less useful. By which I'm trying to make an abstract point about the inevitability of staying somewhat down to earth. I mean "pure" curiosity is great, except it isn't ever really pure, and abstra…

> So it has a connection to human problems, and eventually to practical matters.

But in relation to parent post I was replying to, it did not provide an answer or solution to anything. It has much closer relation to philosophy than anything.

Focusing on only ‘solutions’ in any field is shortsighted because you can’t know how the dots will connect. Someone’s seemingly pointless curiosity or experiment can unlock something unexpected, just like Boole

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#186

Post by scottLobster »

BigGreenJorts wrote: post #60
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…

Sounds like yet another example of how AI is kneecapping industries from the bottom by "removing the barrier to entry" but really just removing the training path by doing the work itself with no guidance for juniors.

Yep, and if history is any guide the only way to play it is to take part and get rich while you can, or play the super long game and be positioned for the collapse.

Businesses will not adapt until they are incentivized to do so, and very few businesses have a multi-decade outlook. Even before AI, the senior 10x employee who retired and took all his domain knowledge with him because there was never any funding to train his replacement was a problem.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#187

Post by andy99 »

Huntsecker wrote: post #163

Anyone else draw similarities with this and the artists and authors who complained when gen ai first came out. I think a lot of people don't realise the disruption ai will cause to many industries, until its directly impacting them, basically personal fable at scale ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_fable ).

I’m curious, do writers and authors still really care about AI? I think by now most people are completely put off by AI slop, the value of AI writing or image generation is basically zero

So I suspect that the cloud will pass on math too, initial demos get extrapolated and people get worried but in the end slop is slop and serious people aren’t getting replaced or even threatened.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#188

Post by math_dandy »

danbruc wrote: post #166
math_dandy wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the most interesting feature of the OpenAI solution of the Unit Distance (Erdös) Problem is that the solution - using deep algebraic number theory as a source of extremal combinatorial/geometric constructions - is much more interesting than the problem’s elementary statement might lead one to expect. Writing off Erdös’s problems as random, useless, or meaningless dismisses his mathematical intuition, second-to…

I am not a mathematician and did not read the unit distance solution too carefully, but my impression was that it used a variation of a known technique to solve the problem. And that makes perfect sense to me, there are a lot of techniques and lot of less relevant problems, I am not surprised that one can solve some of them with known techniques that just nobody has tried [hard enough] before. I am much more sceptica…

We're very fortunate to have had some very eminent mathematicians backfill the OpenAI proof with history, context, and a literature review [1]. Ideas behind the proof seem to have been "in the air". Indeed, looked at certain point of view, the OpenAI construction can be viewed as a high-dimensional generalization of a known low-dimensional one. In this vein see the remarks of Gowers, Sawin and Tsimerman in [1]. Are LLMs capable of "true leap[s] in understanding"? I have absolutely no idea. But LLMs keep surprising me.

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2605.20695v1

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#189

Post by Sebguer »

andy99 wrote: post #187
Huntsecker wrote: post #163

Anyone else draw similarities with this and the artists and authors who complained when gen ai first came out. I think a lot of people don't realise the disruption ai will cause to many industries, until its directly impacting them, basically personal fable at scale ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_fable ).

I’m curious, do writers and authors still really care about AI? I think by now most people are completely put off by AI slop, the value of AI writing or image generation is basically zero So I suspect that the cloud will pass on math too, initial demos get extrapolated and people get worried but in the end slop is slop and serious people aren’t getting replaced or even threatened.

This is quite a way to admit that you don't have any writers or artists in your social group. It has absolutely gutted jobs in these industries, and will continue to do so.

If you think 'most people are completely put off by AI slop', you're living in a blessed bubble because: most people cannot even tell that the slop is slop, and are happy to engorge themselves on it.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#190

Post by rad_val »

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…

AI (in this form) will never be able to solve things we truly cannot solve yet. It might catch things that we didn't project properly or brute force things no human can , but it will never unify general relativity with quantum mechanics. It's amazing at finding hidden truths in large datasets, but won't win a Nobel unassisted.
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