Comment by JeremyNT
1 day ago
> I've been wondering whether AI really is improving rapidly at open problems or we're being fooled.
I think your suspicions are warranted and your explanation seems plausible.
If better training data is the reason here, it would still be a case of the models doing something that is in and of itself super useful! The models really can take that data and distill it into solutions for similar problems faster than humans can. This is great!
But there's so much vested interest in the AI companies to be opaque about all this, to hype up their models and avoid giving credit to people whose data made everything possible, that they would never tell us this fact if it were true.
I feel like so much of the AI hype cycle is like this. The models develop extremely useful capabilities, but it's hard to understand what they really are through the hype. The lies and obfuscation by their owners who have vested interests in capturing the value they provide makes it impossible to take anything they say at face value.
>> If better training data is the reason here, it would still be a case of the models doing something that is in and of itself super useful! The models really can take that data and distill it into solutions for similar problems faster than humans can. This is great!
It's perhaps great in the short term although it's not very clear who it's great for. I'm not sure mathematicians find it all so great, I mean.
In the long term, if this contrives to destroy the tradition of human mathematics the whole endeavour is self-defeating. In time, there will be nobody left with the knowledge and skills to produce mathematics to train AI to do mathematics.
And then we'll be left with no mathematics at all: we'll have no human mathematicians and no AI that can do mathematics, either.
I was pretty depressed when I read about what happened with Navier Stokes this morning. The Clay Math prizes were a significant motivation through my math career, and I know a lot of computer scientists and physicists that feel similarly. I didn't think I was gonna resolve P vs NP or the BSD conjecture, but I did really research that felt like I was working towards something incredible. What is the younger generation left with? Hey kids betcha can't resolve the Collatz conjecture, our superintelligence can't either! Still pretty depressed about it, to be honest. Intellectualism is dead. We can return to happy agrarianism, I guess. At least the AI doesn't wanna eat my snap peas.
This is no time to despair. It's the time to take a stand. If you don't want to see your discipline go the way of the dodo, then do something about it.
I don't know what you should do because I'm not a mathematician. But superintelligence schmuperintelligence. We didn't stop running because we have cars or playing chess or Go because there's chess and Go engines. Even more so than chess there's no point in maths unless it's people doing it, for other people. AI maths makes no sense, like AI art makes no sense, because those are things that people enjoy and can do pretty damn well ourselves so there's no point to automate them away. We gotta stop that bullshit, and we can stop it. And if we don't, if we just sit around and wait for OpenAI and Anthropic to destroy society then that's not their fault but ours.
Sorry, I'm not great at pep talks. Those are brave men. Let's go kill them!
1 reply →
I don’t think this will happen, but it’s possible for humans to adjust our philosophy of mathematical work so that we deprioritize “egotistical” (this is a bad word for what I’m going for, but I mean the desire and economic necessity to associate novel work to your name) discovery and prioritize learning; I’ve never really learned something well without lots of personal insights along the way.
If this is not possible it does make me question whether mathematics ever had any value except for economic or industrial reasons. I do believe it does however, so it must be possible.