Comment by gpt5
9 hours ago
And to be fair - that how medicine works today. We don’t really understand what goes into our body, so that’s why we do clinical trials. And sometimes we discover adverse side effects years and decades after a drug has been released.
Yes, and that isn't the model's fault any more than it would be for a human.
That's what the trials and all are for.
Who cares about understanding it, in the face of efficacy?
I want to understand everything; I think AI will help that happen, not hinder it.
All the arguments about the future mathematicians are imagined, and emotional.
Yep, I think a lot of them are grieving the loss of their identity. Quite understandable given how much of their life force they've poured into math, especially at the level of that Tao is at.
It makes me think of the book Finite and Infinite Games. It provides a perspective that work is just one role that we _choose_ to assume in our life. Realizing that we can choose other roles and move in and out of them freely has helped me alot with big changes (career and otherwise) in my life.
This is very much true, but whole generations have been brought up to be their profession. I have a friend who was a priest. His whole life he had aimed at this role and invested in it, it was no longer a thing to do but his identity. Then he fell out of his belief and as a consequence suffered tremendously because his whole being was tied into that role. He's doing ok now but for a while I thought he wasn't going to make it. Of course 'priest' isn't just any job like software developer or truck driver. But still this job/identity issue is very pervasive.
> All the arguments about the future mathematicians are imagined, and emotional.
Even if you don't like, at this moment, AI cannot replace mathematicians.
Indeed - we don't know all of the mechanisms of Tylenol, yet we know it works, and is safe when taken as directed.
Ironically this is one of the worst counterexamples he could have selected.
If you read all the questions asked by Terrance you would have understood what he is thought behind that question "Could the AI solution to the prompt be somehow misaligned by exploiting a weakness in the trial process?"
He is not talking about a cure that works and that no one understands, he is talking about an AI making its way out of the trial just to get to phase 3...
He didn't do us any favors by writing that slide in a convoluted and inaccurate way.
If AI found a way to exploit clinical trial design, it would be noticed and the errors corrected. In fact, that would be a major win because it would probably lead to improved clinical trial designs.
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It's an ignorant way to make a point that might or might not be valid. Tao evidently isn't aware that many medications we've relied on for decades still have a poorly-understood mechanism of action.
If we followed the precautionary principle and waited until we understood everything there is to know about every drug on the shelf, a lot of people now living would be dead.
Not only that, but also those clinical trials often have low sample sizes. Trials involving only a few hundred patients, or even fewer, are pretty common.
not just clinical trials- there is an enormous amount of in-vivo model study before the molecules go into people.
In vivo is already molecules in body. Do you mean in vitro?
No. I mean in vivo in non-humans, or in human-derived cell lines. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6061782/