Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 703 posts

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#691

Post by kibwen »

timcobb wrote: post #685
redox99 wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many graduate students (I know) are having a crisis if any of their research worth it? If AI can (or will) do everything, what's the point of doing experiments and all? This will eventually deter a whole generation of curious minded students from research. Those who think it's me or the machine will fail. Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed.

What does success look like?

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, timcobb—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless^W not also subscribed to ChatGPT. If you want a picture of the future [of math], imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#692

Post by bwfan123 »

Strilanc wrote: post #236

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…

> So this letter's message will fall on deaf ears

AI companies are alienating the communities they serve. Instead of a win-win dynamic, they are keen on a win-lose proposition. This is unfortunate and suggests the lack of adults in the room. It also reeks of hubris and a god-complex and is all good when making profits is not a concern. But watch the narrative shift when there is an AI slowdown which is inevitable.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#695

Post by airtnp »

I'm so bored by HackerNews commenters on decelerationism stuff. Model doesn't care; the ability for math problems is emerging, not trained.

These mathematicians are not suggesting anything interesting, and the announcement more like desperate crying stuff

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#696

Post by ndriscoll »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #637
ndriscoll wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it does produce value. We now have an explicit solution and even a proof. Humans can then work on clarifying why it's true. Unsurprisingly, not all that different from software, where models can generate working code just fine. The details will all be there and all correct, but the architecture is currently not ideal, so a human guiding it can greatly improve the proofs. I actually found this to be the case with…

>> Humans can then work on clarifying why it's true. Presumably you're a human. Are you going to do that?

There are vanishingly few research mathematician positions and it's one of the most competitive fields, so no. But I'm not sure how that's relevant. As everyone is quick to say, usually the value of a proof is not the knowledge that something is true per se, but the reasoning techniques to understand why. How can it be anything other than helpful then to have a machine that can definitively tell you whether something is true or not before you try to figure out why?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#697

Post by pks016 »

redox99 wrote: post #683
pks016 wrote: post #665

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…

> Many graduate students (I know) are having a crisis if any of their research worth it? If AI can (or will) do everything, what's the point of doing experiments and all? This will eventually deter a whole generation of curious minded students from research. Those who think it's me or the machine will fail. Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed.

That's the crux of it. In the current ecosystem of AI model usage, it's very hard to figure this out for research.

If you set a wrong foot and start trusting the model outputs, you can waste years searching for nothing.

How can someone realize this? By getting proper research training, failing, and learning from mistakes. For people beginning their research, it would be really hard to make decisions to move forward.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#698

Post by glitchc »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #387
cubefox wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the difference?

He sees value in mathematicians using AI to carefully study mathematics, develop an understanding of both old and new things, and help others understand the new things. He doesn't see value in scrolling through unsolved problems asking an AI to please solve them. In his view, this is a fundamental confusion about what mathematical research is for. Knocking down unsolved problems without developing the community's und…

> He doesn't see value in scrolling through unsolved problems asking an AI to please solve them.

Yet that's exactly how the field works. A new grad student is tasked with finding a suitably difficult problem from a list of unsolved problems. The sweet spot is obscure, so that fewer people are working on it, but not too obscure that no one knows about it. It works the same way in theoretical physics and theoretical Comp Sci, and I speak from insider knowledge. The rosy view of mathematicians in the media is largely a product of marketing.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#699

Post by immmmmm »

redox99 wrote: post #683
pks016 wrote: post #665

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…

> Many graduate students (I know) are having a crisis if any of their research worth it? If AI can (or will) do everything, what's the point of doing experiments and all? This will eventually deter a whole generation of curious minded students from research. Those who think it's me or the machine will fail. Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed.

Those who have token money will succeed.

It biases maths and theoretical physics towards the rich.

That one thing that was free.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#700

Post by teravor »

pks016 wrote: post #665

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…

    > Many graduate students (I know) are having a crisis if any of their research worth it? If AI can (or will) do everything, what's the point of doing experiments and all? This will eventually deter a whole generation of curious minded students from research.
should they not be deterred?

we blundered our way into brute forcing (gradient descent) intelligence.

LLMs were a complete surprise to everyone. the transformer architecture was one of those obvious discoveries in retrospect. anyone who was intimately familiar with neural networks at the time and saw the transformer immediately knew that the paradigm shift has arrived and wonder why they didn't think of organizing the function that way themselves.

reinforcement learning has abysmal sample efficiency. and despite that it works because of the scale.

there are multiple converging vectors onto AGI/ASI at this point. more silicon, more architecture hacks, more scaffolds. and an innovation in training that improves sample efficiency - the human brain is an existence proof it's not just possible but there are orders of magnitude to be had.

anyone who proposes so much as a pause, much less a ban, is naive beyond measure. there is no stopping at this point.

Post reply on HN