Comment by WhyOhWhyQ

I would have loved to engage in a conversation, if only to learn something new. But something in the way you framed your reply tells me that that's not what you have in mind. Instead, here's what Dr. Terrence Tao thinks about the same subject [1]. Honestly, I can relate to what he says.

I'm not someone who likes or promotes LLMs due to the utterly unethical acts that the big corporations committed to make profits with them. However, people often forget that LLMs are a technology that was developed by people who practice Mathematics and Computer Science. That was also PhD level work. The fact that LLMs got such a bad reputation has nothing to do with those wonderful ideas, but was a result of the greed of those who are obsessed with endless profits. LLMs aren't just about vacuuming up the IP on the internet, dumping kilotonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere or endless streams of AI slop and low effort fakes.

Human minds process logic and the universe in extraordinary ways. But it's still very limited in the set of tools it uses to achieve that. That's where LLMs and AI in general raise the tantalizing possibility of perceiving and interpreting domains under Mathematics and Physics in ways that no living being has ever done or even imagined. Perhaps its training data won't be stolen text or art. It could be the petabytes of scientific data locked up in storage because nobody knows what to do with it yet. And instead of displacing us, it's likely to complement and augment us. That's where the brilliance of mathematicians and scientists are going to be needed. Nobody knows for sure. But how will one know if you close the doors to that possibility?

I admire Dr. Tao for keeping his mind open to anything new at his age. I wish I had as much curiosity as him.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-will-become-ma...