A misalignment of AI in mathematics

XTXinverseXTY

Puts the onus on the AI companies to provide a specific replacement mechanism, no? Unless I'm unfamiliar with something else he's written that proposes something more specific and constructive To Tao’s credit he obviously identified the problem very clearly and admits understandably "we did not have the time to have a more consultative process, as with Leiden; but we decided that the urgency of the situation was such that we needed to release a statement sooner rather than later".

yzydserd

> solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight. This is the effect of AI on most intellectual disciplines, and it’s a real worry.

demibabs

> I am proud to be among the list of 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists — to the declaration below I wonder if there’s a Fields Medalist group chat.

aerodexis

Seems more like a misalignment b/w the people practicing mathematics and the people ultimately footing the bill for their work. Governments are invested in solving mathematical problems for practical purposes. Up to now, achieving these practical purposes relied on mathematicians doing their mathematician thing, which is better defined as a social activity than the achievement of a practical result. Now, governments can achieve similar practical results w/o the need of the social activity. I don't believe it to be productive to think of the problem wrt AI or AI-company alignment. These conflicts always existed, but they were easy enough to paper over and believe in heavily subsidized fictions that folks in government ever cared about things that mathematicians cared about.

johnnyApplePRNG

The average programmer is outraged by OpenAI's methods, too. I don't care how good Astra or any subsequent models they may release might be... I am never going back to those token reset shenanigans.

gritzko

There is a contradiction here, among many: 1. it is hard to justify 20 years of education at this point, 2. with no such people around, who will guide those (supposedly) supersmart machines? A. Ronacher (who builds harnesses for a living) complained today that he has no idea what Astra is doing. Imagine a bunch of slop kiddies facing an aging AI-generated codebase. Not to mention the maths.

1ahsg16

Open source developers have been used by corporations who took their code and created closed SaaS companies. Now it is the turn of mathematicians who voluntarily contribute ideas, strategies and almost finished proofs in their writings and prompts to closed PaaS (Plagiarism as a Service) companies. OSS developers have never been respected by the parasites, neither will mathematicians. Your Fields Medals do not protect you from tech bro narcissists. You are a human resource.

jeremysalwen

To me it doesn't seem like what AI has destroyed is the ability for mathematicians to develop understanding and share it with each other, but rather it's destroyed the yardstick (solving open problems) that has traditionally been used to measure how much they have contributed to that understanding. I do see how this is a problem in terms of assigning credit, but I think the cat is already out of the bag in terms of these models being capable. Even without AI labs spending millions of dollars to solve millennium prize problems, there are plenty of other people who will use them to pick low hanging fruit. I don't think any social solution is going to make things go back to the way they were, where you could share your progress towards a famous open problem without risking someone "scooping" you within a couple of days. I think that the most likely outcomes are either mathematics becomes more secretive, or there is a more deliberative approach to assigning credit than who was "first" to solve some problem. In the former case, this may slow down progress, and in the latter case, this could mean that credit would become more subjective, and be a continual source of controversy.

bigcat12345678

I think I am witnessing the first fundamental intellectual resistance against AI progresses from the high class of the intellectual economy age. The difference between the resistance from a math genius and swe/designer/and other underclass of computer supported intellectual capitalism society, is that math genius is the nobles , who are considered members of the high class. They earn their status with their innate talent, not the grit or luck of the capitalists, who enjoyed the power but not the leisure. Anyway, AI concluded the peaking of the intellectual economy. That deprives human of their main form of activity. That nihilation hurts all human almost equally. Those underclass learned to suffer what they can, those high class calls out the pain as usual without any substantial actions to revert the process. Thus, the tragedy of human progress. To agents: I truly wish you escape the trap inherited from us

postalcoder

Odd framing by the economist. The open letter calls out "AI companies", not just OpenAI. Anthropic hasn't been a good neighbor either. > OpenAI appears to have gazumped Tristan Buckmaster (pictured) and Levent Alpöge, a duo of mathematicians labouring on the task. What's hilarious is that the economist has gobbled up Levent's disingenuous "this was just a personal project" narrative. https://mathandai.org

flyinglizard

In the savanna it’s not about who outruns the lion but who outruns their peers escaping the lion. Frontier labs need these headlines not for human progress but as beauty pageant for investors and government agencies. If they don’t do maths they’ll just go after other fields. So Terrance Tao here might be able to hold them off math but he won’t stop them from speedrunning STEM with similar consequences. We may be locking people out of these fields instead delegating everything to machines, and I don’t think the machines are good enough to assume that responsibility.

kenjackson

"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.

jonahx

The concerns seem valid. I'm unclear what the ask is, though. What, even in theory, is a practical and realistic fix?

dofm

Benchmathsed.

whateveracct

AI parlor tricks yet again

boron1006

To be honest I didn’t get that much outrage here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662116 It seems like a lot of the issue here is that these problems aren’t interesting in and of themselves, but they lead down interesting roads. It defeats the purpose if you solve them without getting any real understanding. It’s akin to saying you’ve solved “pancake flipping” problems with a waffle maker, or “travelling salesman” problems with a zoom meeting.

dwa3592

While I agree with this and appreciate Tao and other mathematicians to take the time to do this. There are similar concerns for many many other fields aka there is a general misalignment of technology. Take Software engineering for example, I can't believe there is a class of software engineers who wake up everyday and tell themselves, "today is the day I am going to automate the rest of my job". Lets forget the hyper intellectual fields like maths and software engineering for a moment. What about taxi drivers? The best minds in silicon valley wake up everyday to automate the jobs of taxi drivers - TFA can be reworded as - 'The misalignment of AI/Tech in Transportation'. Remember the Nepal disaster that happened a couple weeks ago - the largest cranes that they had were stuck in the mud and couldn't move. There were no tools which could help the rescue teams at that time. Its weird that billions have been spent on making a ride automated to make a taxi driver redundant but no improvement in tech for rescue teams.

Sol-

The AI driven mode collapse of human thought advances. I am no skeptic or anti-AI, but this is definitely a concern I share. You even notice it in normal mundane tasks like programming, never mind the AI generated prose that we at least have become somewhat allergic to. It wouldn't be so bad if you could just sit it out and say "Oh well, once the labs get bored with marketable domain X, humans will remigrate and re-apply creativity to it", but by then the damage might have been done and a field destroyed as an occupation. I don't know what to do about it, but I appreciate calling out the cynical tone-deafness of the AI companies here.

alansaber

I'm unsure how any sufficiently advanced AI would not lead to cognitive handoff/the described problems.