Comment by jebarker
8 hours ago
I don’t think your second paragraph is a fair representation of what Tao is saying or contradicts his argument. He is arguing that AI can be useful in the service of human understanding in math and the examples you gave are exactly that. Whilst OpenAI just spammed the AI button the mathematicians that engaged with the output were able to progress their understanding about the problems in some ways (some of which they don’t really like). You need both parts for this to be useful to the field. What’s not clear is whether the juice is worth the squeeze: will all the money spent on spamming the AI and human mathematician time spent studying the outputs progress the field “better” than without the AI?
> What’s not clear is whether the juice is worth the squeeze: will all the money spent on spamming the AI and human mathematician time spent studying the outputs progress the field “better” than without the AI?
The AI proofs are a side-product of benchmarking current and in-development models on especially hard problems. They're clearly cost effective for frontier AI firms, and free for the taking as far as human mathematicians are concerned. The real issue with them is that they look like bizarre nonsense as written, so they need mathematicians familiar with those specific areas of math to "decode" and digest them.
> They're clearly cost effective for frontier AI firms
It's not obvious that this is a given. "Cost-effective" implies a comparison between cost and output. OAI spent millions to race human researchers on Navier Stokes, and that doesn't even account for the training cost. And how does one value the output? OAI is for some reason still hiring armies of humans instead of automating roles like "AI support engineer" or "Product Designer" (https://openai.com/careers/search/).
Calling the proofs a "side-product" is also rather dubious when OAI employs a team of mathematicians specifically to train its theorem proving capabilities.
Yeah, right now the juice isn’t only about the progress of math - it’s also the advancement of the LLM tech and the marketing benefit to the AI companies which feeds back into developing the tech. Those each have a different juice to squeeze ROI.