Comment by nilkn
4 hours ago
There is no such thing as knowledge that has never even been written down a single time by anyone or anything. Those are simply called ideas, they are not unique to humans, and they are more likely to be wrong than right compared to anything OpenAI just produced. It would be bold and almost certainly spectacularly wrong to assume that multi-trillion-parameter AI models could not possess their own such ideas, generated during the training process as part of their internal model of the world. Beyond that, if we assume that such knowledge does exist in humans, its marginal value is clearly nearly zero now, as AI systems without access to it are vastly outperforming all human mathematicians combined by multiple orders of magnitude.
So you're saying there was no knowledge before the invention of writing?
This feels like a very rigid ontology. I know what type of food my dog prefers. An executive assistant has intimate knowledge of their boss’s needs. Neither of these would become knowledge if they were written down for the first time; they already are.
You’re distinguishing “knowledge” from “idea” in a particular way that doesn’t correspond to common usage (see my counter examples). Without you being explicit about your definitions, I can’t tell whether what you’re saying is meaningful. It feels tautological.
Given that an executive assistant has unwritten knowledge that is necessary to do their job, where your evidence that no mathematician has analogous knowledge (using the word in the common way, not whatever way you mean it)?
It’s possible, but it’s not as obvious as you seem to think.
I don't know that any of this really matters. I could just as well say that you don't know anything at all about the internal experience of your dog's mind. All you can do is read behavioral patterns and attempt to make inferences. At best you have an approximation, and approximations tend to be wrong. Math is correct knowledge, not approximations of reality. Correctness is not a property of the idea or inference itself, since ideas and inferences can be wrong; it's the result of a verification process which you cannot possibly carry out in its entirety relating to the internal conscious experience of your dog.
We can dig into the philosophy of these definitions, but I think the far more interesting point is that even if we grant the existence of this kind of knowledge in the minds of human mathematicians, we have passed the threshold where that "knowledge" can keep up with systems that do not have access to it. Moreover, to claim humans have a "vast amount of mathematical knowledge" that is apparently valuable and that AI systems don't have, you'd have to prove that this "knowledge" is not implied or cannot be reverse engineered from the entire corpus of mathematical writing on which AI systems are trained. You'd also have to demonstrate that this "knowledge" leads to actual results that AI systems cannot generate without it. Given the results AI systems are producing, which are far beyond human ability at this point, it is more likely that AI systems have already internalized the entirety of this so-called "tacit knowledge" and then went much further, much faster, without humans in the loop at all.
So your position boils down to “the only real knowledge is that which is provable”. Tautological. And probably not self-consistent, given Gödel.
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> There is no such thing as knowledge that has never even been written down a single time by anyone or anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge#Definition
Those are simply called ideas, they are not unique to humans, and they are more likely to be wrong than right compared to anything OpenAI just produced. It would be bold and almost certainly spectacularly wrong to assume that multi-trillion-parameter AI models could not possess their own such ideas, generated during the training process as part of their internal model of the world. Beyond that, if we assume that such knowledge does exist in humans, its marginal value is clearly nearly zero now, as AI systems without access to it are vastly outperforming all human mathematicians combined by multiple orders of magnitude.
> Beyond that, if we assume that such knowledge does exist in humans, its marginal value is clearly nearly zero now
"If those grapes exist they are probably sour."
They aren't just ideas, i read that in semiconductor manufacturing these old heads have a tremendous amount of process knowledge that's never been written down.
I'd need to see specific examples. It's not clear to me that I'd consider this knowledge about the world but rather agreed upon conventions for how humans work together.
I do research on programming languages. There are many facts about programming languages that (1) nobody else knows and (2) I have not written down because I just haven’t had the time / opportunity.
The same happens all the time in mathematics.
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