Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

cryo32

As a mathematician by trade I think they’re overblowing it. You can choose to use it or not. I choose not to because I enjoy the process. But I’m not doing formal research or getting paid to do it these days. I will note that the average corporate mathematical modelling is usually a fucking circus so adding AI might make it better.

silveraxe93

> However, the declaration argues math is more than a machine for producing correct answers. There might be more to maths than that, but that is definitely the most important part. I love science funding. But not because it's a jobs program for nerds.

fooker

I'm curious about whether we will start discovering new maths in the next few years that provide insight into unsolved CS or Physics problems!

bandrami

My vague prediction right now is that in five years LLMs will be heavily used by universities in grant-funded math research but nobody else will be able to afford it, much like supercomputer clusters 25 years ago.

Dilettante_

>and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake Except when someone hands you a magic button that just gives you knowledge?[at least in the framing of this "warning"] Then it's about peoples' livelihoods, about "culture", etc? "Computer" used to be a job. Did science on the whole lose or gain by making these clerks obsolete?

TrackerFF

I've said it before, but there's a massive risk that we simply stop educating researchers. So much of a Ph.D revolves around the person learning how to do research. They learn how to read papers and literature rigorously. They get low-hanging fruits to practice on, which can take months. Their funding doesn't come from thin air either. So what happens when the group leaders would rather spend money on compute, and get models to solve the low-hanging fruit? Which the models could very well do in mere hours, compared to months. Nor does it help that publishing is the number 1 measure in academia. Furthermore, the access to compute and capital could end up be the defining factor between researchers and research groups. It is basically the "junior problem", but even more severe.

freakynit

""" However, the declaration argues math is more than a machine for producing correct answers. The discipline, its authors believe, is a deeply human endeavor built on creativity, understanding, collaboration, and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Those values often clash with the incentives driving AI development. “The tech industry proceeds in accordance with commercial logic, which is antithetical to the values of mathematics,” declaration co-author Michael Harris of Columbia University told The New York Times. """ I mean, what field doesn't? Everyone works to make money. Slightly unrelated, but, their website " https://leidendeclaration.ai/ " itself gives an eerie feeling of being built by Sonnet. That color scheme and the layout is what Sonnet chooses by default most of the times.

Spacecosmonaut

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 generates and verifies proofs without humans in the loop. Where the mathematics may be beyond human comprehension. In that future, does it matter that early career mathematicians are inhibited by these developments? Perhaps not. Programming faces the same issue. As AI crawls up the competence ladder, does it matter that fewer people have opportunities to develop the skillset of a senior engineer? Perhaps not.

meindnoch

Another mathematician already predicted this, but you didn't listen. His name was Theodore Kaczynski. It's time to reap what you've sown.

Myrmornis

> AI-generated papers could overwhelm peer-review systems with low-quality work That's not a problem unique to math, or even to academia. It's a problem in every context in human life where people communicate via written documents.

juleiie

I will argue that AI and flood of low quality slop makes genuine human work more valuable, not less. The ability to clearly outmatch trillion dollar machines is a very unique satisfaction. I even write ordinary internet comments with an intention to make them clearly better and more fun to read than boring Claude output.

dhfbshfbu4u3

In a year, none of this will really matter. Intelligence is now a scalable resource independent of biological constraints. Everyone will use it because the system will no longer afford them the luxury of time. In a decade (maybe sooner), references won’t matter either.

turzmo

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 questions on the wrong end of the spectrum: Erdos problems are exactly the sort of "useless" questions that people might answer purely for the love of the game. The sort of questions that a young person might cut their teeth on and gain confidence. Solving questions like these automatically, I think, is not good for the long-term health of research. At least for the foreseeable future you still would like people to become interested and develop skills in these fields. These developments, and especially how they are presented, directly discourage that.

sylware

Are maths AI models now using "tools", aka formal solvers? I understand that the "language interface" of a "maths AI" could be some specialized trained LLM (Large Language Model) that to convey, with human language, "high level" mathematical mental contructs and intuition. But then, you would need some models which does the reasoning using formal mathematical solvers (and probably a ton of "scratch" memory, it would be interesting to see how those models end up storing "mathematical" lema data). I guess you can have ML (Machine Learning) for those models on 'general maths', but also we can think about more mathematically focused ML for a specific problem, area, etc. And in the end, ML for maths, would it be mostly permutations of truth statements fed to a neural net? When we were talking about "AI", one decade ago, that was what most had in mind (it may help a bit in physics, but it seems less likely, because reality/experiments are hard to teach to "AI"s). If that becomes a reality (aka easy hardware access, and some "working" models), mathematicians will have to be as good in maths than in maths ML. And this is were there is an issue: training honestely good mathematical human brains may become very hard with some broad availability of good general maths reasoning "AIs".

ck2

I still don't understand how "AI" is ready for serious use beyond entertainment purposes Every time I ask ChatGPT to make a table for a subject I know well, I will find an error in one of the results and it is very confident about it until I question it in detail Every time I ask ChatGPT for nutritional breakdown of some dense food source and give it a quantity like 8 ounces and ask for the weight of each ingredient, the weights will be wrong and add up to more than the original weight of 8 ounces These are variations of the old "how many Rs in strawberry" problem, it's still not solved, "AI" cannot reassemble a complex problem properly A lot of what it tells me in detail about some subjects sounds suspiciously like Reddit posts reassembled out of order

spwa4

Actual "warning": https://leidendeclaration.ai/ Far more interesting as it's outlaying a set of principles for using AI to augment human involvement and science, rather than replacement.

Theodores

From the article: > However, the declaration argues math is more than a machine for producing correct answers. The discipline, its authors believe, is a deeply human endeavor built on creativity, understanding, collaboration, and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Generation X was the last generation that had 'general knowledge', as in an abundance of fairly useful information stored in 'grey matter' that could be recalled quickly. When search engines came along there really wasn't much need to know anything since most things could be looked up. However, you still had to think. With LLMs, thinking is kind-of optional. This really is an existential threat to our intelligence since 'use it or lose it applies'. I am glad these mathematicians are doing their duty as canary in the coal mine.

knollimar

Math for non mathematicians is a tool. Math for mathemeticians is an art in the same way an artisan takes pride in his work. That's why there's a disconnect when you go from math for engineers to the stuff above it. It feels less useful and very different

modriano

> “The tech industry proceeds in accordance with commercial logic, which is antithetical to the values of mathematics,” declaration co-author Michael Harris of Columbia University As a former physicist and current data scientist/engineer, I know for a fact that commercial utility drives math research and researchers. Math is a tool to solve problems. Some mathematicians might only love the process of using the tool, but commercial logic absolutely drives mathematician attention to develop commercially useful tools.

phyzix5761

Is it possible they feel threatened their jobs are at stake?