81–90 of 654 posts
Looks like mathematicians (like people in many other professions) have to redefine what their work means and how to define success. Hard to agree that a tool that can find a proof is detrimental by itself, rather it voids some assumptions people relied on previously
"how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place." That sounds like an "us problem", not an AI or OpenAI/Anthropic problem.
Are you implying that OpenAI using someones unpublished research without their permission to solve an career defining math problem with their latest model in order to publish first is a problem with the mathematicians? My read on this document is that people's work isn't being fairly cited more than what does it mean to be a mathematician in this age.
The concerns seem valid. I'm unclear what the ask is, though. What, even in theory, is a practical and realistic fix?
Expect to see this reaction in all sectors of the economy in the coming years.
Without the ability to do things the "hard" way it is difficult to figure out if doing things the "easy" way will help us advance the frontier of math and science.
I may be wrong but historically we had this version of science discovery for a long while (empirical observation and brute force application) rather than first principles leading to applications (tools, the wheel, mills etc). Then somewhere along the way it flipped after Newton and the enlightenment period and started understanding first principles before they become engineering applications.
Perhaps it is not required, and we can just keep doing things the "easy" way like we used to, or we might find ourselves out of the ability to brute force things and then we go back to needing to do this the hard way, at which point this period of AI brute forcing would be seen as a detriment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you implying that OpenAI using someones unpublished research without their permission to solve an career defining math problem with their latest model in order to publish first is a problem with the mathematicians? My read on this document is that people's work isn't being fairly cited more than what does it mean to be a mathematician in this age.
This is the real issue, though this article does not really hit on it explicitly just alludes to it.
On the contrary to what Tao believe, it seems like we need AI to move the needle on mathematics. > problems in many fields of mathematics Developing these different fields moves complexity from the field itself to the interactions of these fields. Getting too preoccupied with the established terminology risks us a local minima. Anf because the field overall has become so complex that we need to decompose into subfiel…
Are you a working mathematician?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What benefit is there if the machine has unlocked understanding but no human has? What incentives are there for humans to learn and gain such understanding from machines?
The same incentive there always was: Because you wanna know. What incentive were you thinking of?