Comment by zozbot234
8 hours ago
> AI is now capable of constructions so complex that no human or human team can unpack.
How can we possibly know this when we haven't even seriously started on the endeavor of actively reverse engineering these AI-generated proofs? That's a proper job for human mathematicians, because the AIs themselves are demonstrably clueless about what steps in a proof are genuinely interesting and load-bearing from a human POV. This is evidence of a limitation in AIs' capabilities, not of any kind of misaligned behavior. The fact that Tao actually uses that term in his complaint is deeply disappointing.
Not to mention, there are already (pre AI) machine-generated proofs that we've pretty much agreed not to try to explain fully, like the four-color theorem which ends up with brute-force verification of 600+ cases (down from close to 2,000 when first demonstrated)
> there are already (pre AI) machine-generated proofs that we've pretty much agreed not to try to explain fully, like the four-color theorem
Algorithmic verification is a very unsatisfying answer to the problem (e.g., surely it's not just dumb luck that every single case happen to have this exact property), but that's an entirely different issue than saying that no one follows logic of the proof method itself.