Comment by philipswood
19 hours ago
Honest question: how is this different from some unknown mathematician having a breakthrough?
I mean: if some reclusive Japanese genius had a breakthrough on your problem and published it, would you have felt the same?
And if not, why not?
If that had happened I would be overjoyed, maybe a hair chagrined that I didn't get it myself, but truly happy that someone got it and that I could go and talk to that person. Because it's the kind of problem I don't think would have fallen to a human after a few hours of thought, and I would have so much to talk about with that person. I would fly to Japan and hope to have tea with them, I would learn some Japanese to make the conversations easier. I would learn some interesting things hearing about their struggles and their false starts. I would make friends with that reclusive Japanese genius and my life would be far richer for it.
I will never meet that person and I will never hold a real conversation with the "creator" of that proof. They will never tell me how they came up with the cancelling exponential summation that cracked the construction. It's just another enigma but one that is far more unknowable than the original problem.
This experience of alienation is a social consequence of the mechanization and automation of mathematics as intellectual and creative work. There is no author or thinker behind the creation of the proof, only the practical result. It's the same process as the industrial revolution, but applied to the intellect and mental work, where factories and machines replaced manual craft, devaluing the community, culture and humanity around the work.
I don't know, I work in a field that could be seen as the logical culmination of the Industrial Revolution (to this point) - highly technical, machine assisted knowledge work - and I have community, culture, and humanity in my working life.
Weavers don't have dibs on those intangibles.
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In programming we've been dealing this for a while. You see some weird code that doesn't make sense, maybe it's a lack of your understanding or maybe the code is bad, but you can't ask the author anymore since it's an AI.
You can -- just ask the AI to explain it. For truly weird stuff sometimes it takes a few rounds of back and forth to really grasp what is going on, but the model also has infinite patience and availability.
Beautifully put.
> It's just another enigma but one that is far more unknowable than the original problem.
You just made my day, beautifully said. Thank you Sir, for all your thoughts expressed in this thread. You put an human story behind the #180 number.
Thank you!
In this case, once the model is released anyone in the world will be able to go to https://chatgpt.com/ and talk with that model.
You display zero understanding of the human experience you’re responding to.
That's not the same as talking with the person who would have made the proof, and it's hard to argue that's comparable at all.
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Likely will never experience talking with that model.
It’s probably distributed on so much compute that it would never be economical to serve it to you or I or anybody
It's still not quite the same though, is it.
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Being #180 on a big list without a lot of individual passion or effort surely stings more, I'd imagine.
Not that things like that can't happen with humans too (Salieri v. Mozart comes to mind).