AHM Statement on OpenAI's October 6 Release of Mathematical Documents

brap

Oi you got a loicense for that maffs?

Simulacra

Mathematicians need the permission of mathematics, not the other way around. That they didn't ask for it is completely beside the point.

asa123

this is like an extreme extreme version of how the general regards letter from the UN “denouncing” said “horrible” activity engendered by nation “X” with no teeth, stuff like this starts to feel a little funny+sad

super256

This is language Paul G warned us about since, I don't know, at least a decade. Literally ticks all the boxes.

glimshe

A depressing statement that does nothing to increase people's support of working Mathematicians. It feels like a low-effort political hit as opposed to the balanced writeups we've been reading from top Mathematicians like Terence Tao.

chank

Nobody needs permission to solve an open problem. That's the whole point of publishing them. The question for any result is whether it's correct, not who produced it or whether anyone requested it. Bringing up OpenAI's lawsuits is irrelevant to whether these proofs hold. And calling a release that includes Lean formalizations a "demonstration of power" gets it backwards. Machine checkable proofs are the least "trust me" form of mathematics there is. There are fair criticisms here. Not every result is formalized, the model can't be reproduced by outsiders, and the massive dump strains review capacity. Those are reasons to demand full formalization, open access to the methods, and help funding human review. They aren't reasons to dismiss correct mathematics or to tell people to stop working on hard problems.

kolinko

„Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done.” Since when science works like this? One point I might slightly agree with - refusal to acknowledge work done with nonpublic models. Otoh in other fields and in history it’s been common to do science with resources unavailable to common people.

himata4113

Isn't the big problem here that volunter work is being exploited by billion dollar companies? Of course it's bad and there should be a solution where openai pays people to verify the information they put out in the public before it ever reaches independent reviewers.

skwirl

I'm having a really hard time seeing how this letter could conceivably be perceived as persuasive. In fact, this letter makes it clear that the people behind it are seeking to maintain their previously entrenched power, prestige, and control over a field of human knowledge. And they are going about it in a futile and debasing way.

kccqzy

I fail to see how this organization, AHM, has any relevance.

sscarduzio

No reference at the quality of the OpenAI results? Not a mathematician, but I heard demonstrations are written rather poorly.

fidotron

"Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done." Gatekeeping much? "Mathematicians have a particular vision of progress that is informed by history and field-specific considerations." This cannot seriously have been written by anyone mathematically literate, it's just too embarrassing.

OutOfHere

Of course the dinosaurs chose to bury their heads in the sand, and asked that everyone else does too. They've no place in the new world. They could've instead come up with good feedback to improve the paper quality, but they didn't.

ChrisArchitect

Some more discussion Terence Tao crosspost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000421 Related: “Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50002008

Legend2440

Sounds like sore losers. They got beat at their own game by a computer, and they're mad about it. It's just sour grapes.

crypto420

I kind of see their point. For thousands of years mathematics had this aura of being at the pinnacle of human thought and was one of the things that separated us from other species. People like Euler, Gauss, Euclid, Hilbert, Erdos had this aura about that them that they were on the noblest of pursuits - trying to solve problems that had no immediate practical use, and largely needed focused thinking over extended periods of time with the occasional spark of creativity. Then comes along AI, a mass extinction event to the entire field. It turns out LLMs can think for longer without stopping, have better recall and working memory. What we're seeing now is a 5000-year old set of institutions facing an existential threat because they no longer require humans to be the sole source of labor. I find the closest analogy to be automobiles displacing the horse-carriage industry in the early 1900s. Horses couldn't protest and rapidly went out of a job, but horse-carriage owners and that industry certainly did. https://ghostsofdc.org/2018/07/16/horse-dealers-claim-automo...

spongebobism

There are 2 strong points buried between the snark: that the AI math advisory group, which OpenAI announced working with just 2 1/2 weeks ago, is against using internal models to solve open problems (per their general guidelines[0]); and that this mode of dumping results before having a friendly formulation doesn't center human understanding. IMO OpenAI's way of publishing also goes against other parts of the general guidelines. Also, I doubt they'll follow point 2B3: > For each result released, the AI lab should make public the name of the model, the prompts used, a (summarized) chain of thought, the time taken, and the estimated cost of computation. Releasing additional material that sheds light on the scientific process that produced the results, such as the initial LLM outputs before they were cleaned up (as recommended in (1) above), is strongly encouraged. [0] https://agmai.org/general-sep29/

mellosouls

Note, AHM is "The Association for Human Mathematics" You don't even need to click on the link to predict the Canute-style tone. The emotional reaction is understandable, but should not guide the rational response.

samlinnfer

Old man yells at cloud.

woopwoop

I am a former mathematician now working a regular job (not affiliated with OpenAI). Just speaking for myself, I find this statement deeply embarrassing and at odds with the spirit of open inquiry for which the community of mathematics has (nearly) always been a standard bearer.