Comment by skwirl
3 hours ago
I'm having a really hard time seeing how this letter could conceivably be perceived as persuasive. In fact, this letter makes it clear that the people behind it are seeking to maintain their previously entrenched power, prestige, and control over a field of human knowledge. And they are going about it in a futile and debasing way.
As I understand it, this is one of the groups OpenAI claimed to be consulting with to improve their process after the Navier Stokes fumble. I think OpenAI might have even said something like “in accordance with this group’s guidance” in the big dump? So this post should be read as distancing themselves from OpenAI and denying any legitimacy OpenAI tried to derive from their association.
Edit: on researching more, I don’t think this is the case; I must have confused them with some other group.
You're not talking about this, but I actually said the same thing about the state of software engineering a few weeks ago. So many fields are facing an existential crisis.
they could have definitely written it better and put more effort into it. As it is, they have real gripes with how openai is doing things and i think they should have concretely listed their objections. Either way, if OpenAI dumps a gazillion proofs, who actually is going to read them, understand them, assess their correctness etc... ? If no one is doing that, is that problem really "solved" ? So OpenAI just dumps proofs and calls it a day, or this trillion dollar company can spend some effort engaging with mathematicians but really OpenAI doesn't really care about Math, they want to prove that their frontier intelligence can just do it all before they IPO. You say the authors are trying to maintain their power, but what is OpenAI doing? Certainly, you are naive if you think they are doing this stuff for the benefit of humanity or a goal of advancing mathematical knowledge.
>Certainly, you are naive if you think they are doing this stuff for the benefit of humanity or a goal of advancing mathematical knowledge.
Certainly you are cynical if you think it won't benefit humanity or advance mathematical knowledge.
Who knows, If compute keeps dumping proofs for problems but no one knows their correctness because mathematicians stop investing their time in understanding these proofs, then you can't even really use the results or you can use it in the same sense you use stuff you don't really understand: You trust the author. With humans, there is a certain level of trust in people and institutions - with AI, we aren't really there yet.
Certainly, you are feigning ignorance about them not caring about this but for IPO hyping.