Comment by omnicognate

The problem isn't effort, though. All of the things I mentioned constitute effort and could be rewarded. The job economy was created by mathematicians incentivizing the proof of difficult theorems above all else and valuing all other work at approximately zero as far as career advancement was concerned. Now they're pulling a 180 and claiming that math was never really about proving theorems, but that's contradicted by their revealed preferences. The strip-mining problem only exists if they continue with the status quo ante.

That's an empirical claim. I could equally well say that doing an automated search of the problem space and having a database of results and open problems will identify vastly more interesting and valuable areas. Again, the idea that math is some exhaustible material is a metaphor, not an established fact. I'm willing to change my view as new evidence comes in, but I think we're going to have to wait and see what the landscape looks like in a few years.

> the incentive to mine that particular area drops considerably, dropping the chance to discover potentially brand new materials that would have been found the normal way.

FWIW, I think the metaphor breaks down with this framing. This isn't really a problem associated with strip mining, what's left behind is generally low or negative value (toxic). I'd suggest a different metaphor, from Wikipedia:

> This process involves the removal of all ground vegetation in the area, which is a detriment to the environment.[19] Topsoil may be placed over the tailing along with planting trees and other vegetation. Another reclamation method involves filling in the hole with water to create an artificial lake. Large tailing piles left behind may contain heavy metals which can leach out acids such as lead and copper and enter into water systems.

This feels very similar to the issues with algorithmic problem "mining". It has the potential to destroy the human ecosystems surrounding these problems, leaving barren wasteland behind where nothing can grow or flourish.

You're right, and that's a bad thing. AI is nothing fundamentally new, but its extremity is making many people aware of the truth that's been there all along. There's no contradiction in that.

> Do we see strong moats that are going to cause monopoly in AI?

Ownership of the capital assets used to train and inference new models. Yes, we may end up with more than one firm. But as we see with big tech today, a small number of fantastically wealthy firms in "competition" does not an open market make.

And incentives are sovereign over the humans. The humans leading the AI labs have every incentive in the world to move quickly without any restraint.

I am not sure how convinced I am by that argument. A gun is also a particular kind of tool, and it makes the person at the handle end sovereign, and the person at the pointy-shooty end subjugated.

When you blanket a set of things with a pejorative, and it turns out that some of the members of that set are demonstrably and definitively NOT covered by that pejorative, and that all the pejorative means at bottom is "I don't like", all you've accomplished in the long run is to call into question any future legitimate use of that pejorative. It is tempting, especially when heated, to stretch an invective, but it will ironically only lead to the death of its utility over time.

They're not calling any output slop, they're calling indecipherable output slop. The management class responsible for hiring, firing, and paying people doesn't possess the domain knowledge to say for certain whether or not LLM output is optimal (which, in this context, means correct), but they will trust that it's good enough to justify further automation / fewer grant approvals / etc. So in that sense, slop can and will cause the economic issues people are concerned about.

University boards want the prestige of successful research programs. Doing the hard work to get something demonstrably true is going to lose out economically in this paradigm, where we are all being conditioned to uncritically ooh and aah at the incantations being elicited from these magic boxes. The oracles even have legions of zealots who will berate you for not being sufficiently deferential and reverent, or worse, accuse you of blasphemy. If for no other reason, I agree with using the term to express all of the above succinctly, even if LLMs can be helpful tools generally.

I've read some of the results papers (the Einstein condensate one and the pi exponential one). I'm not an expert but it definitely wasn't AI slop. The introduction sections were particularly well framed and informative.

Also you can see in the papers where an idea is introduced but in the bibliography you can see where the foundational idea comes from. So the narratives are not unmotivated as some claim (proof without intuition claims).

In the context of maths papers, the term has come to refer to papers having the shortcomings that are, for whatever reason, typical of LLM out, including things like using non-standard terminology all over the place, emphasizing easy steps while leaping over harder ones, having bizarre organisation, and, importantly, failing to properly cover existing work and as a result being hard to tell from plagiarism.

The degree to which these issues feature will differ, but it is generally the case that converting the output to proper research requires significant effort, hence the AGMAI recommendations being what they are, and not performing that effort tends to come off as laziness or incompetence, so I can see how slop has become the popular term.

> We can't just call any output slop, or it loses all meaning.

The term “ai slop” is not supposed to discriminate good ai output from bad, the entire purpose of the phrase is a blanket term that delegitimizes all ai output.

A Swedish proverb says, "a fool may ask more than ten wise may answer". This fool is reporting for duty! I'm glad I may have something to contribute after all (and I'm only halfway joking)

i'd be curious to hear why he thinks ai couldn't help make it easier to discover interesting problems, ie to make the interesting subset less scarce.

That’s what we are doing with nature, seas (look up strip mining there, it’s a horrible practice), and now the industrial harvestors are strip mining problem spaces. How do we like our own medicine?

AI math: "We believe this resolves all remaining questions on this topic. No further research is needed." https://xkcd.com/2268/

We don't give mathematicians research positions to solve crosswords for fun. We want something back. We want theories and results that will advance our civilization.

This is a really confusing take.

If someone can solve open problems in mathematics then they should do so, isn't it as simple as that?

They should let the public use the models as well, but I guess they have no real moral imperative to do so.

But asking them to stop solving problems is just weird.

What is preventing these crossword solvers from not looking at the advanced crossword solutions?

Mathematicians and academics in their ivory towers are forgetting that everything is getting automated. They want to carve out fun problem solving niches that's fine but who's going to fund that? If they want to be funded by the society/civilization their argument can't be leave advanced fun problems for their hobby.

Its worth noting though that you are comparing a profession with a hobby.

People go to said crossword group to enjoy the process of solving the puzzles. It doesn't actually matter if they have been solved yet or not, case in point the NY Times puzzles are enjoyed by more than just the first to solve them.

Professional mathematicians are ultimately being paid to solve the problems for a (hopefully) practical reason. Its always excellent when a person enjoys the process of the work they are paid to do, but ultimately they are still paid to do the work. I really hope your argument isn't that we should collectively be funding mathematicians to solve problems simply doe the love of the game.

Classic alignment problem.

Despite nobody at openAI thinking of themselves as an asshole; despite society urging openAI not to be an asshole; despite the fact that being an asshole is entirely unnecessary even to accomplish whatever objective they are setting out to accomplish; despite everyone at openAI loudly declaring: we are not assholes!

They are still assholes.

This analogy is silly because (a) math is not primarily for entertainment, (b) we aren't going to run out of math proofs, and (c) results build on top of other results, having more results proven makes all math more powerful and useful.

Hmmm but in the case of math, while some of it is "just puzzles" there often turns out to be practical applications, even if they are not obvious at first. Number theory was considered the epitome of pure math with no practical applications for centuries, now our modern society is built on it (public key crypto).

If the crosswords were purely games that would be no problem. These crosswords seem to power physics, chemistry, engineering and science applications. These professions would not mind it too much.

Blah blah blah. They are free to do their own mathematics and/or spend time on polishing/reviewing proofs dumped by ai. But they don't get to make demands like don't test math on proprietary models. Idiots.

Math doesn't belong to academics. We don't pay them to work on problems for fun. They will just need to re-evaluate where the value their provide is. It won't be solving problems anymore. Hopefully it will be making them understandable by others at least till AI can't do that as well.

There's no way to spin this that doesn't make it sound like assholes being gatekeepers.

I’m sorry; but if mathematicians are in it because puzzle club is fun, then they should go join the fucking puzzle club and stop impeding scientific progress.

Science isn’t some passive busywork thing where you tie your hands behind your back because it isn’t fair on others to solve all the neat problems - or at least it shouldn’t be.

If your idea of science is leather patches on tweed suits and the quiet ticking of a clock while you do crosswords, then this is an argument in favour of letting the AI do the work so you can focus on your sudoku book in your slippers.

So what is mathematics then? A fun hobby akin to chess or sudoku?

Are we gonna get the same pushback from medical researchers if the models cure xyz diseases?

I absolutely understand the emotional connection to their work and the heartbreak, but mathematics doesn't exist for their pleasure, it exists to provide tools to solve humanitie's problems.

“ AI will do politics and philosophy””

Incredibly delusional and disconnected from the vast majority of people who are voters.