Comment by snailmailman
12 hours ago
I think there are some interesting parallels between what the Cleo account did, and what the large AI companies are doing now with some of the proofs for previously unsolved theorems.
There may be some value in the answers, but for some the value is in the understanding of how to get from the problem to the solution.
I wouldn't call myself a mathematician, but I encountered a few problems in my CS classes where I could work through the proof by hand, see that an algorithm works, and even mathematically prove it, but yet still didn't feel like I understood why it worked, or how the algorithm was invented/derived. But for many, the fact that it did work was enough.
Joe McCann and his audience discovered that Cleo was a ploy at ragebaiting the math forum in order to drive engagement for more useful proofs. A real-world Cunningham's Law social experiment.
So maybe OpenAI's ridiculous approach to mathematics has value in how it's ragebaiting us to scrutinize and/or come up with better proofs!
Ok, where will you shift the goalposts if next year AI will also be superhuman in didactically explaining proofs to humans?
AI capabilities keep getting bumpier and bumpier. There's no reason to believe it won't stall out on a front that it is already quite bad at (correctly formalizing in human language)
“LLM progress will stall in some area at some point” — which is my interpretation of what you wrote — feels particularly unfalsifiable
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It's a new technology and we're figuring out important distinctions as we go, nothing necessarily intellectually dishonest about that.
If shifting goalposts makes AI better, why not shift them?
I don't think that is the thing that makes AI better. In the metaphor the idea is that someone scored a goal and then people retroactively shift the goalpost to say it doesn't count as a goal.
Is there any evidence it does? Without that it simply feels like poor debate.
The point of understanding is to get better at proving new things. Now that humans are obsolete for proving things, human understanding is unnecessary.
This is a bleak view.
One can also say: The point of humans is to produce things for the economy. Now that humans are obsolete for producing things, humans are unnecessary.
Would you agree?
The economy seems to be agreeing.
> for some the value is in the understanding of how to get from the problem to the solution
All of the value is in this understanding.
So many people are still in denial about it, but "AI" really is just a natural language search engine. AI helps organize what has already been written by humans and was technically self-evident from our work.
If we allow ourselves to continue down this anti-intellectual path and stop caring about why proofs work, we've basically entered another dark age.
I'm not saying AI can't possibly help at all with building intuition, but clearly there are a lot of idiots in the class who just gotta raise their hand first to blurt out whatever trash they come up with on impulse. Those people need to be told to sit the fuck down already. Their uncontrolled ADHD is ruining everything. There's nothing intelligent about mindlessly rushing to compute an answer. That is literally what the last few years have felt like for everyone else.
> AI helps organize what has already been written by humans and was technically self-evident from our work.
I am not 100% sure about the "self-evident" part here.
To your point: yes, AI doesn't come up with new axioms. But then we enter the topic of "math is invented or discovered?". Each of the discoveries are logical consequences of the axioms, but that doesn't mean they were "self-evident", especially for humans.
If everything was already self-evident, AI would just be a useless tautological machine. However, I think it is more than just that