Comment by paxy

8 hours ago

The approach hasn't changed all that much. It's more that the scientific community is slowly starting to accept the inevitable.

13 comments

paxy

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stillpointlab  8 hours ago

From the article:

> We reached out to external experts and asked them to act as shepherds, organizing groups to understand the new results. They advised three different release strategies

1. They identified relevant experts for each of the discoveries they wanted to release

2. They collaborated with them to determine how to release the results

The effect for the first two (maths, comp sci) was the same because the experts they chose made that decision.

The downside here is actually the third case (physics). Since they only chose 5 scientists (David Gross, Michael Douglas, Arthur Jaffe, Igor Klebanov, and Nikita Nekrasov) and those scientists chose to keep the results private until they finish their own work. Everyone else who might be interested has to wait.

That was my favouritism aside. Scientists working on similar or adjacent problems that are not included in these kinds of private releases might feel they are not getting a fair chance.

This is a process that will change, but it seems they listened to the anger from the math community and made changes that help address the concerns.

  • clickety_clack  5 hours ago

    I think, sadly, these fields will collapse further into a tighter in-group. Anyone outside that group will find it increasingly hard to penetrate. Talent won’t get you there anymore.

    • iugtmkbdfil834  26 minutes ago

      But they were already a tight in-group. The difference was that now their combined output can provide additional insights not available before. I don't think that part is a problem. Expertise circles have always existed ( and will likely remain so for a while ).

      The issue I am having is how members of the potential in-group is identified.

      That said said:

      << Talent won’t get you there anymore.

      Talent might not get you to the table, but you can make your own table now if you have useful like minds.

    • dingdongditchme  3 hours ago

      From my experience in research this was already the case 15 years ago (and from older peers, way before). Science has always has "in-groups". I forget the name of some philosopher in the 50's who was the opinion science is just a bunch of fads and it takes the old generation to die before a new idea can really be accepted.

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InfinityByTen  6 hours ago

The hubris in the framing is astonishing, amusing and sad all at the same time. Many say, that's what HN attracts. Anyone who talks about inevitability except of death in these times is just someone who considers they'd be in the "have" rather the "have not" category.

I still can't see what this means for human understanding and how open would this knowledge be. Who'd ultimately get access to this stuff going forward and what kind of power games would ensue hereon.

  • pingou  3 hours ago

    I'm not sure why you think that someone who believes that this is inevitable is just someone who assumes they'd be in the "have" rather the "have not" category.

    It seems like you are doing exactly what you accuse the parent commenter of doing. The only difference, perhaps, is that the commenter seems to extrapolate past progress to future progress, while your own assumption is a lot more tenuous.

    • InfinityByTen  3 hours ago

      What assumption do you think I make? I'm curious.

      I just find it uncertain what lies ahead. I just don't see the sustainability in this. I have degrees in Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing. If the "inevitable" is that I do manual labour till we can augment the robots to do that as well, I don't see how me or millions others similar to me have any agency.

      Right now, a bunch of stuff is blurted out every month or quarter and people in notable positions are given a chance to "tidy it up". Let's assume that you have even the open weight models at your disposal, the hardware to run any of this in the kind of scale needed, requires capital of Governmental level funding.

      Where I see this heading is that there'd be a divide of who controls the resources to produce and who gets delegated to do the menial work. If that's what you mean by my tenous assumption, please do share what you see differently.

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