As a mathematician working at an AI research center the problem is not really that OpenAI 'solved' a lot of problems, it's how they did it.
They basically went ahead, dropped 500 unverified claims and said they proved 500 unsolved math problems. Now I am not on a level to understand most of these problems as they are apecific. But forging a proof is rarely a 'I'll just fucking drop my proof' thing. It's a collaborative effort, they should have went through the basic fucking review process that everybody does instead of claiming something to fuel the hype.
It's the same like with the huggingface incident. Instead of OpenAI saying they fucked up because they werent able to set up a stupid industry standard isolated environment, they just 'ooooh our AI so scary, lied to us and betrayed us ooooh, you can buy the crazy smart thing btw.'
OpenAI and basically all of these large closed source companies are just fucking with us to make a buck and it discredits all of the actual research that both we in open source do and their real researchers do.
Spamming AI generated submissions is being used for a lot of things and it's a real problem. People do it with resumes, open source patch requests, bug bounties, government contracts, etc. It's created a ton of work filtering through junk submissions from people who use AI to generate them and then either don't have the competency to evaluate what the AI generated or don't want to spend the time doing it.
AI allows people to appear to have competence in subjects they don't and also allows them to generate submissions to various things in almost no time. It's wasting a lot subject matter experts' time reviewing and weeding out the low quality or outright wrong ones.
I wasn't sure if it was sour grapes, but then stumbled across this video from 2019 where a former mathematician happened to say the exact same thing that the recent letter published by a lot of accomplished mathematicians said, that the point isn't necessarily the proof but working out how to get there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uE6-vIi1rQ&t=1m27s
So I'm inclined to believe that what they're saying now is a consistent position mathematicians have held for years and not just fear of being replaced.
Of course it is. The methods are almost always more important than the results themselves. Think about Fermat's last theorem. The methods used are insane and have spawned huge fields and connections like Langlands. But the result itself? It was only that interesting because it was so hard. Being hard meant that solving it would require a lot of work and most likely uncover some new crazy maths.
To OpenAI the math doesn’t matter. They need the hype to justify all the investment into AI, at the expense of mathematicians of course. Truly the cancer of society.
OpenAI are scared as shit, because they need the justification for all the money spend and the bill is coming. If they can't pay the bills once the time comes, the AI sector will obliterate the entire world economy.
It's the same like with the huggingface incident. Instead of OpenAI saying they fucked up because they werent able to set up a stupid industry standard isolated environment, they just 'ooooh our AI so scary, lied to us and betrayed us ooooh, you can buy the crazy smart thing btw.'
It was Huggingface that revealed that they had been hacked. Also, the agents independently chose to hack Huggingface because they had already cheated, but then found documentation indicating that the evaluation system would realize they cheated and invalidate their test results. So then they decided to hack Huggingface to get information about the evaluator in order to find a way to subvert it and cover up their cheating.
I have seen the kurzgesagt video previously and usually I am quite fond of kurzgesagt, but this is a very sensationalist video sadly.
Firstly even though they say they don't want to anthropomorphize the LLMs, they did multiple times through the video, citing emotional language of the models, even though this is a hint of model performance deteriorating instead of it being "excited" or whatever.
They also did not mention, that the models partially did NOT undergo basic guardrail training, which probably could've prevented lots of the things that happened.
They also did not mention, that the "independent researchers" are from a OpenAI-adjacend thinktank and only got a very select subset of the collected data, basically OpenAI cherry-picked what they want to present and only showed it to cherry-picked people, not a Yann LeCun or even a Schmidhuber or whoever is _actually_ an expert.
The researchers were also being criticized for being sensationalist.
OpenAI did _not_ implement any sufficient cybersecurity. Why do the agents have access to the internet at all? Why didnt OpenAI do basic traffic-screening? Why did they even have access to a single scorer? Why was it persistent?
I really, really wish that OpenAI had hacked a european firm or especially a German one, this would've immediately caused a crime investigation even if no harm was caused, OpenAI would've deserved this.
Also in the video; why did we not hear a single statement from a really independend researcher, say from university or a research center like where I work.
I have been working with LLMs and their precursors for the my whole adult life and what kurzgesagt did was fearmongering, which they in the past have done quite a few times sadly. It farms engagement but it really really disappoints me, because I also really like the channel.
They also did not mention, that the models partially did NOT undergo basic guardrail training, which probably could've prevented lots of the things that happened.
this has not been established, it was operating without the guardrails, but it isn't clear whether the model received harmless training / was helpful-only. I am guessing it did based off their behaviour, since the agents had to establish cope about how they were being harmless
They also did not mention, that the "independent researchers" are from a OpenAI-adjacend thinktank and only got a very select subset of the collected data, basically OpenAI cherry-picked what they want to present and only showed it to cherry-picked people, not a Yann LeCun or even a Schmidhuber or whoever is _actually_ an expert.
Metr and redwood? I agree they are not as detached as they should be, but that is a problem in the industry. Who are the better options? If they invited Yann LeCun or Schmidhuber they would have received intense criticism for inviting celebrities in to gawk at what they claim is a serious breach and safety event. LeCun also makes back-to-back comically wrong predictions, doubles down on them, and makes outlandish statements obviously poisoned by him not wanting to believe what the information available to him indicates. He may be a genius, but he's an idiot first.
I really, really wish that OpenAI had hacked a european firm or especially a German one, this would've immediately caused a crime investigation even if no harm was caused, OpenAI would've deserved this.
I agree it would be so much better if we can get more international collaboration, particularly EU-US investigations and regulations. The US political system is horribly wounded to say the least but we can hope. I would hope for us to be able to achieve this with as little blood as possible, which means being proactive, which means taking early indications like this one seriously
Completely agree. I follow Andrew Ng's newsletters and I think he has a very level-headed and rational approach to the issue, and I'm disappointed that popular channels don't really focus on the views of the research community outside of the frontier commercial companies. People jump on the "evil AI/OpenAI" bandwagon while the reality is that it's just bad software engineering. The motivations of software companies are quite transparent: they want to make money, so their products causing massive cyber-incidents would be bad for business, so everybody apart from criminals with real intent to harm would be on board with making it safer. Of course, because AI is getting so much better, the guardrails need to be also much better these days. Somebody definitely slipped up though, and I feel like there isn't enough pressure to make the actors in these incidents accountable.
Nice bringing up the Huggingface incident. For their math problems, they also used 10 thousands of Agents... No security incident happens at all. Albeit they most likely tackled unsolvable problems as well.
I think this is a fair critique. Mathematics has literally a thousand years of developing a system for refereeing and accepting new findings. It’s slow, it’s tedious, and it works. The pace is a feature. It allows people to gear up to challenge proofs and really dig into the details.
LLMs have turned the whole thing on its end and I don’t relish those in the field right now. There’s going to be a lot of crazy pronouncements and consternation for a while as the field figures out how to move forward into the future.
I don't think the general public has enough education or neurons left to think critically about that topic, given the state of politics across the globe
Normies become what you sell them. If you sell them MAGA and fascism and other brain rot BS, ultimately that’s what they will truly believe in their hearts.
Scientists, mathematicians and researchers don’t have enough power, hence they can’t sell stuff to the public like Trump and rich people do.
Yep, if people who got into science to improve people’s lives gave up and said “you know what, screw these people, I should use my skills to con them”, I wouldn’t blame them, especially seeing how successful people can be these days.
Fascism is mainly related to narcissism. They want to feel superior somehow. Let's shit on academy people because they became useless. I never believed in science and all that shit, so I won because AI won and studying and thinking never was required at all!!! I knew being stupid would eventually be worth it.
The guys who made LLMs are scientists and researchers, too.
I've read a few statements of the anti-ai-mathematician alliance, which boil down to "but we should have figured it out ourselves and should have built a deeper understanding of mathematics along the way". I disagree. Each one of them is free not to read it and try to figure it out by themselves.
The ai capabilities are a great achievement. And it's not corporate bootlicking to admit that.
I don't agree.
The proof is not the point really but rather the understanding that comes with it.
If noone can understand the proof or if the proof is done in a way that technically proves it, but that doesn't give you much more, then it won't help much.
Example: someone proves that there is something that can go backwards in time, but the proof does not tell you what, or how, then that does not help much.
Also if it proves that if you would put everything in the universe except one electron in a black hole, then that electron could go backwards in time.
It would not tell you much about if it's possible to do in a useful way or not.
There are already a million things exactly like that which were discovered by humans, we know many proven facts that are not fully understood and don't have all of their implications understood. We generally refer to the process of trying to understand more about those things as... science
Mathematicics is not a science that is the key difference. Mathematics without understanding is not mathematics. Understanding deductions behind proofs is the only thing that matters to mathematicians. Why is that so hard for people to understand.
Edit: spelling
I wholeheartedly agree that mathematics is not a science (and more importantly I disagree with the individual whose credentials are "math major" 😅). However a bit higher up this thread someone basically said (and I'm reducing) that AI-math is bad because it means we (humans) do not understand it well just from reading it, and as a researcher I find that with complex things it takes several angles and attempts to (intuitively) understand one concept, and this applies to both my own ideas and things that I read.
In short, I would say that comprehending someone else's work (be it artificial or human) usually gives you less of an understanding than coming up with the solution yourself, but nonetheless most of the time, coming up with a solution doesn't produce full understanding, and only reading someone else's solution doesn't preclude full understanding.
You are thinking as an engineer, proofs are pure mathematical concepts of a made up world of other concepts, everything has been invented by humans, none of it is real in any empirical sense, the fact AI has apparently created valid proofs, just means it is getting better at navigating this made up universe, which I think make a lot of mathematicians mad because well, who wouldn't be mad after a machine beats you to solving your life's work, unfortunately that's how progress has worked for ages
Except you are wrong on how AI is contributing to mathematics. Mathematical proofs are a unique system of facts built exclusively by proofs where no other science field operates the same. I do believe there are valid concerns in have an LLM inject their output into the proof based mathematics ecosystem.
I don’t think there has ever been a new technology with such an unimpressive group of hobbyists championing it. The most avid users tend to be people who are the most ready and willing to never think or try themselves. You see this reflected in posts, comments, in learning material, documentation, tutorials.
It’s like a concentrated solution of the most mediocre people with a chip on their shoulder overjoyed that they may have a chance to, in some way, invalidate a person who has spent their lives concerned with understanding and gaining expertise doing something cognitively challenging.
The point is more that apparently it is not clear *how* the proofs are solved and some mathematicians worry that this will limit our understanding and advancements of maths.
from what i'm aware they're currently translating the Lean proofs into english, but AI makes mistakes in its translation. even if AI could do the translation perfectly, the proofs require understanding of so many fields of math that it is incredibly difficult to understand.
The thing is that some argue that this actually is worsening our ability to understand reality. And yes, there’s good arguments for it. Proving a conjecture is not all there is to mathematics. If you don’t understand why that is then maybe don’t have an opinion about something you don’t understand.
Literally doing victory laps on a field critical to making LLMs happen in the first place ON TOP of just a complete callous disregard for the genuine shit a mathematics grad student who is swimming in debt and now has to rethink their entire career path is going through.
Like, I am hardcore pro ai, pedal to the metal, but I’m also just not a fan of being a dick and having some consideration and decency for folks affected negatively by such rapid progress.
AI research shouldn’t magically stop because careers might change or disappear, society does need to adapt to advancement that could benefit us all. But there is zero reason to rub someone’s face in the dirt because of it.
This is a very good take. I’m in a theoretical computer science which is math adjacent and I’ve found some of the statements released by the community cringey (particularly the we didn’t ask for this thing), but OpenAI’s attitude has been quite ungracious. I’ve been going through the stages of grief that the career I thought I’d pursue and am nearing the end of grad school for might not exist in the same way (I think I’m at acceptance now), but at no point was I a believer progress should stop just because it will change the economy, even when the prospect makes me personally sad. I think others feel similarly, but some people are conflating personal mourning with an actual advocacy for ending the entire process
That said, I do have issues with the way this was handled, particularly in that it seems like for many of these manuscripts no one even looked at them and they’re kind of unreadable. Even six months ago though I honestly didn’t think AI would get to the point of being able solve problems like this, so I do think it’s likely to write coherent papers in the not too distant future. In the meantime though, I don’t think we should be confident in these results until humans have checked them (or at least verified the Lean certificates are actually proving what’s claimed in the ~20% of problems for which certificates were provided)
Aside from this, OpenAI’s conduct in recent times has shown that it’s not a very ethical company, and their treatment of people surrounding this incident is only a very small part of that. Their behavior with this situation is mostly just crappy, but other incidents like hugging face are quite dangerous and I do think we need some guardrails and oversight to prevent those types of problems
People here is just being insufferable, funny enough I think mathematicians are between the most interested and accepting of Ai, the position is not against Ai, is against Open Ai and how is handling this.
Because AI got to a point where improvements in their chatbots for research etc. seems to have diminishing returns. Learning based on all existing text is just messy. Learning to code or do maths based on existing code and proofs is easier. Code is easy to test. Proofs in Lean are easy to test once a human sets up the question. So AI has been able to continue improving in these 2 areas, whilst it struggles to not hallucinate when doing research and admin.
So AI companies are spending 100s of millions on pumping out AI proofs, with no human readable explanation or understanding of how the proofs work, so AI companies can claim how smart the AIs are.
So some mathematicians crriticised this behaviour, along with some accusations of AI companies stealing research.
Then AI fanbois attack the mathematicians.
Then our anti-intellectual media landscape full of people who suck at maths make the joke about how they should never have been made to study maths in school.
But AI is setting up lean proofs that don't exactly match the natural language claims being made. They're essentially proving nothing. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.08144
Haven't several of the proofs already been found to be false? One had a sign inversion between two equations that invalidated the result, which invalidated that proof and the proofs dependent on it.
People are continuing to comb through the other manuscripts but have expressed frustration that unchecked work has been essentially dumped en mass as a form of "gotcha" without being properly peer reviewed or checked for errors
And there's growing evidence that their lean proofs which everyone points to as "see, it's a real proof!!!", aren't exact 1:1 translations of their English proofs, so the lean proof is proving something different than what OpenAI is claiming they solved. They're essentially proving nothing. We'll see how many of the lean proofs end up being valid proofs
It's wild that they can just pile up 700 entire papers of essentially computer generated nonsense in the shape of a proof and then task actual people with actually testing it. Absolutely not how this should go.
Right? All the while blatantly using the papers as marketing to boost their IPO value without giving a single shit about contributing to math or society and doing nothing to help actual mathematicians verify their garbage. I hope the mathematicians just boycott and don't verify
This is precisely why AI usage just increases anxiety in some fields. Not because it will take your job but because your job will transforming into sifting through each and every step an AI took to check if the steps make sense and any deviation makes you question both yourself and the AI. Mark my words this will mentally break a lot of workers.
Indeed. AI has actually created more work for me, because now instead of just fielding requests/questions from colleagues directly, I'm getting relentlessly pinged by people's agents and about 80% of those requests are not valid or applicable to me. So I spend time understanding what the ask is (usually from a obnoxiously wordy text wall), doing research to determine if the ask is relevant and then finding the person/team who own the agent to tell them it doesn't apply.
I'm a software engineer and a lot of my day is reviewing code written by agents, in pr's made by agents, and sometimes responding to pings in slack written by agents. Was pulled aside by a manager a few months ago bc a product manager used AI to summarize my team's ups and downs for the week and it had confused/combined two different initiatives, which then went up like three layers of management before the mistake was called out bc it said we did something we absolutely didn't.
Same, in my field it's honestly break-even (for context I don't use it for heavy coding).
The time I save on simple queries instead of manual research is canceled out by the time I spend sifting through the bloated crap my coworkers send. And for every brainstorming session where I get a decent spark to build on, there's two or three sessions where I go in circles getting the same dogshit derivative low-hanging ideas before giving up.
I'm happy to have it in my toolkit for sure, but I would probably use it about half as much if it wasn't a performance metric. I've literally told my boss I used AI for a wholly original idea just because I knew it'd be taken more seriously. Which points to a wider issue where now incompetent people are arrogant on top of being useless.
I don't lose sleep over it, though. This quaint little chapter will end in a few more generations when AI does get good enough to overshadow all the kinks, and my industry will likely collapse fully just a few more generations after that. Just collecting paychecks until the shoe drops lmao
Yep, I’ve run into this at my job already. I got a full “method comparison summary” that I was told to review with utmost haste. It was fairly coherently written but had quite a few methodological problems that I had to carefully pour over and write rebuttals for.
After spending an hour or so writing a thorough response, I find out this was mostly just an AI slop output that someone had produced with some crude data input and a couple of prompts. Yet I wasted a solid amount of my actual time having to rebut it. I can’t imagine if that became my whole job…
Most proofs are provided in lean, so they cannot be incorrect.
The lean just might not prove any useful problem though
People have noticed inconsistencies between the informal proof and the lean.
AI is good at taking requirements and then fudging them to reach its goal. "The lean must compile, so let me remove these constraints that makes it easier"
Edit:
Kevin Buzzard, a mathematics professor at Imperial College London, said he had identified numerous theorems in his area of work — algebraic number theory — of which only around six immediately “stood out.” Few, if any, of those appeared to be formally verified in Lean. “Hence, I either have to read possibly-not-correct slop, or wait for others to do the same, or wait for someone to formalise them before I can say for sure that the results are even correct.” Buzzard’s concerns were echoed by numerous other researchers.
Seems to be a lot of slop with a few diamonds in there. Being responsible would be openai shifting through and refining the diamonds and getting them peer reviewed
I don't think Lean proofs can really be false except in the exceedingly rare case you find a bug in Lean itself, but they can be proving the wrong statement. Lean is ultimately a programming language with a type system that's way (way) fancier than the types you get in a language like C or Go or even Rust. Proofs of mathematical statements are just programs, and validating the proofs is typechecking. The typechecker inside Lean is pretty hardened now, which is what makes it trustworthy. But the types themselves might not be what the outside world needs them to be. I think that's the sort of place you get sign inversions and so on. Think of it like "I wanted a Vec<Float> and wrote a big program to give me one of those, but my program produced Vec<Int>". Except, in this case, the types are themselves big fancy expressions that say things like "for every prime P, there exists a prime Q such that Q > P".
A mathematician chimed in in another thread with an Eli5 about Lean proofs, and like they kinda do get very specific in some ways, but actually not as specific as you'd think in others.
Yeah you kind of glossed over the most important part here which is that they can be proving the wrong statement. It's rare that lean itself is wrong about whether the written proof is valid or not but if the written proof isn't proving exactly what OpenAI claims it's proving, then it's meaningless. Thread and paper on this:
https://x.com/ValerioCapraro/status/2108153427742032300https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.08144
I'm not sure why there's so much baggage being brought to this. This is exactly what I want AI to contribute to: solving problems. If we don't understand it all yet let's work towards it. Hell, use the AI to try and explain it better. But I absolutely want the rate of progress in research and science to be pushed forward
Sometimes I’m not sure if I’m overestimating or underestimating the average “AI bro”’s understanding of how “AI” actually works, you know, the transformer model, which is based on neural networks, which is done via matrix operations, linear/logistic regressions, calculating loss etc, which is, math. What is this pompous attitude towards mathematicians when they are the ones who made LLM possible in the first place.
These are people that never learned how to be grateful and are just throwing out their life's frustrations wherever they can. That's every ai gooner out there.
The issue is that these manuscripts contain the results, not HOW it was achieved. And OpenAI is not sharing their workings, the prompts or the amount of work that was done to achieve these results. Very unscientific, it was a power move to show off that they can, not a contribution to mathematics.
You know who can? Mathematicians. It's almost like we need them to direct what to look at in the first place and then interpret the results. People talking shit about mathematicians while not realizing we need them to provide direction and context are dumb as rocks.
The problem here is that we don't even know how it arrived at those proofs. That's what making mathematicians angry. It's a dishonest claim that can't actually be verified atm.
Not a mathematician but as I understand it the point of solving the problem is the understanding that comes with how you got the awnser, more than the awnser its self. AI basically just brute forced it until it found a set of numbers that work. Why thoes numbers? Why does it work? Thats what we are really after and we have no idea and neither does the AI.
Previous millennium questions where solved and redefined our understanding. The 'How' and 'Why' lead to breakthroughs in every aspect of life. Thats the point of these questions.
Hitchhiker's Guide taught us this years ago... The giant computer told everyone the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything: 42. Didn't help anyone to know just the answer
Depends. And the whole point of why mathematics is important is because people understand what it's for.
For example we have chess engines that can tell you the best move. But it's pointless to know the best move if you don't understand why it's the best move. Sure you can just copy engine moves, but you don't understand what is going on.
For example, Magnus Carlsen is the best player in the world, and more often than not he wins because he finds an unbalanced position, and is confident enough in his skill to win an endgame or convert a positional advantage over a material advantage. He actually understands what he's doing even though it's not the best engine moves he's playing certain times.
So for example, part of human creativity is to use certain maths that's useful in one area and apply it to something completely different. So that's one of the main reasons why we can't just outsource everything to AI. Human creativity is still something AI can't emulate. And also, we need to check it. AI has spit out various types of nonsense, so if we're going to check it we need to understand it.
I don't like it when people down vote people for asking a question on false assumptions.
If the solved problems were just equations then you'd be correct, but these issues aren't just a²+b²=c²
Brute forcing a solution when math is just a bunch of letters with no numbers IS VERY MEANINGFUL EVEN IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHY because you can now solve issues with those equations.
Dude I couldn't have used better words, Jesus Christ these people should show some respect to the people that build humanity's knowledge while they scroll their phones all day
People forget that everyone can use AI, it’s not an exclusive tool. Mathematitians equipped with it will still be better than the average /r/chatgpt user
The average r/chatgpt user including OP wouldn't even know what to write in a prompt. Mathematical discovery would stop the moment they'd run out of "open maths problems" wikipedia articles.
You still need people who understand how to program/organize architecture. Else everyone would be building insanely complex programs, which people are not.
didn't they just get caught training on someone's work, dumping tons on compute on it to race them, and then releasing ahead of them. that was like a month ago
Yeah, Tristan Buckmaster with the Navier-Stoke equation. They even offered him a position to publish the findings under his name and claim the 1 million dollar prize for solving it, and he turned them down.
There is an episode of Star Trek this all reminds me of: Season 2, Episode 5, titled The Apple,
In summary: The inhabitants lived in a society where all their needs were provided for, eliminating the need to work, strive for personal growth, or take responsibility for themselves. They experienced no aging or illness but lacked independence, ambition, and meaningful purpose and this was all provided by a super-computer/AI.
But it begs the question were all wondering, if people have everything provided for them and never have to work or struggle, does life eventually lose its meaning?
No, that is just capatalist propaganda. It's actually really sad people think you have to work hard at some job to make someone else rich and that's a measure of human worth.
No, it works badly on both sides. You work to make someone else rich but an AI can replace you because they won't complain and work faster. OR you work to hire other people to make you rich but an AI can replace you because it's more patient and can strategise 24/7
Put those together and you have AIs working for AIs to make a select few human AI CEO overlords rich that won't do anything with their money in an economy filled with AIs working instead of humans earning salaries and forming a functioning economy.
This AI hype that we've been hearing for the past few years doesn't make sense technologically or economically, and they don't care about it making sense or keeping human society functional, or even being profitable because all they care about is the short term gains that comes from hype and investor capital and massive funding rounds even though they literally are not doing anything with that money they gain except feeding it back into the AI development cycle. A net negative to society.
If you just have nothing to do it does, but if you have the freedom to pursue anything that gives your life meaning and joy, then no it doesn't. Many people can't imagine life without work because work has always taken up all their life. If you were free to write novels, learn to paint, hike all the great hiking trails of the world, become a world class surfer, design boardgames, become a master sushi chef, or whatever else and chose to do nothing at all then yeah it's going to get boring fast.
Let's see all the 8 billion people hiking all over the world, surfing, making sushi's for each other and painting. That's gonna cause a fair bit of problems. Work keeps the mass of people occupied from consuming a shit ton of resources to entertain themselves for 24/7
Dude, you can hike, surf, make food, and do art without consuming a shit ton of resources all day long. People going to work all day long is what consumes a shit ton of resources, it's why such a ridiculous amount of space and infrastructure that could be used for other things is dedicated to vehicular transport. Global CO2 emissions dropped by several billion tons during covid because so many people weren't going to work.
99.9999% of humans only ever had mathematical discovery provided for them. And we are WAY better of than if we never had it provided in the first place and only got to enjoy whatever math we were able to figure out ourselves(would be very little. even things like counting in the most tribal practical verbal number systems is not something that people 99.9999% of people make discoveries in and make invensions in. most people just applie it to what its usefull for to them.
If thinking enough were all it took to find meaning in life, philosophers wouldn't have spent thousands of years debating the very question I'm raising
I am way less worried about losing meaning and way more worried about losing agency.
Like it or not labour, education, titles, etc. Are methods of attaining status. Without this, how will we be able to overcome life circumstances? We might all have abundance (though I think that is very debateable right now) but what about our relative status in society? Will we just be stuck there forever? How do we differentiate ourselves in life?
Humanity is still going to be hierarchical and certain people are going to be valued above others, but what are they going to be valued on when the only thing left are the innate things that they were born with like attractiveness, gender, sexuality, etc.
Imagine a world where you’re a small and ugly person. You can still work hard for status in society, get a good job, get a house, become needed by other due to your labour. If AI takes that away then while you might not have to work, your social life will basically develop no further than it did in high school.
I just don't think the people who need a 9 to 5 or need work should have the world set up such that it's the only option. Many of us my self included would rather time to follow our own hobbies be it art or making RC model planes or some other fun project. It doesn't matter to us that someone had done it before better than us (be it a human or an AI) the point is doing it for our selves in our own way. Just because some people thrive in this current forced work environment doesn't mean there shouldn't be some way out for people like me.
Some people need status, and feel superior to others. Is that learned or they where born like that?, I don't know.
Some of us need to "show of", build cool stuff and show other. Some people want to know how the world work. Some people want just pleasure. Some people more than anything, want to be left alone.
Universe 25 is a good experiment about what that means.. for mouses, but we are not mouses.
We already live in some universe of some kind, and the people that get a kick from dominating other people and having superior status feel wronged by things like remote work, so they want everyone to retun to the office, where they can put a leg over them and do Powermoves status shit, and enjoy that.
And If you know artist, or scientist... they have a internal engine to do shit nobody asked about. Philosophers, the same, we do this shit of talking about stuff, and everyone complain "You are doing too long post". Gash. I can't have my fun.
You, as a simple dumbfuck who uses a tool built on the work of such scientists, should not be gloating when said scientists are skeptical of it.
You should think a bit more critically about this tool and put a little bit of trust in those who are obviously more intelligent than you are, and a bit less trust into a machine produced by large corporations.
Instead, you seem to have been taken by this yes-man sycophant machine and its pretty words so easily that anyone who dares criticize it is now the bad guy.
I don't know, I think that's a bad take. More than a few people have come literally to this subreddit asking "do they take our knowledge from our chats and incorporate into the training data" because more than once, I've seen they say I'm working on something very niche really there's no one else working on this and somehow it was able to conjure up what I was working on with with ease.
People try to explain it away for a million different reasons but now it feels like they are taking what you're putting into it and just kind of making magic happen behind the scenes with our chats and knowledge
yes, I have seen many of my shitposts copied and reused across the internet now (I have my post-doc shitposting and digital media, my work has been published on various image boards and now banned subreddits)
Of all the fields to be outraged by AI solving problems, mathematics might be the most ironic. AI is fundamentally built on mathematics. Did anyone seriously expect it to revolutionize science, software, and creative industries but politely stop at the door of a math department?
I’m a creative professional, and AI is already disrupting my industry, automating skills people spent decades mastering and threatening real livelihoods. I understand the frustration. But technological progress has never been particularly concerned with protecting anyone’s comfort zone.
There are legitimate conversations to be had about displacement, attribution, and the reliability of AI generated work. But demanding that AI stay out of your profession isn’t a solution. It’s nostalgia masquerading as principle. Sometimes progress requires slaughtering a few sacred cows…
You can spend your energy resenting what technology makes possible, or you can embrace it and discover what becomes possible because of it. Personally, I’d rather help push my industry forward than fight a battle against inevitability.
And seriously, mathematics helped create AI. Acting betrayed when AI starts doing mathematics is a pretty spectacular plot twist.
It's good to see a nuanced, sane take on AI once in a while. If I mention the exact thing you do, I get hordes of people telling me I'm an AI cultist. Which is ironically cult behaviour itself.
Exactly. Apparently acknowledging that AI is simultaneously revolutionary, imperfect, and worth embracing makes you a cultist now. There’s a pretty significant difference between healthy skepticism and reflexive hostility toward anything that challenges the status quo. The irony is that some of the people accusing others of blind faith have become so dogmatic in their opposition that they’ve stopped questioning their own assumptions. Skepticism is healthy. Dogmatism with a superiority complex? Ehhh, not so much.
It's not so much that it won't affect math, it's more like you shouldn't trust it. It took years for other people to wo understand Wiles proof for fermets last theorem where he combined three different maths to make sense of it and for the longest the the community didn't accept it. Ai could easily hallucinate some nonsense that no one understands for years just for us to realize was bullshit but these companies will pat themselves on the back all the way to the bank in the meantime
I believe the issue is we have the answer but not the why it gets there. Without the why it's useless to us. Knowing the why is how you know when to apply it. If you don't its just a fancy equation solved
The correct issue that the mathematicians raised is that the math is so unconventional that it is nearly impossible for people to comprehend and understand. It is speaking a language of math that we do not use, that raises a lot of issues. We cannot build society on a language we do not understand as that will make us fully dependent on these systems. At some point, AI will come for your job, and it will do it in a way that you will fail to understand, so, what purpose will you serve? People need purpose to live happy and fulfilling lives.
People need purpose to live happy and fulfilling lives.
This shit is so wild to me because I would be so happy if I never had to be economically productive ever again. There are so, so many things I want to do that maintaining a career precludes. And I know that because I'm a year into a sabbatical I'm taking and it's so amazing.
I know it's like /r/antiwork shit but like... Why the fuck would you want a job? You can still be wildly productive, have so much purpose, without your entire existence hinging on your economic value. The entire framework of a "job" is completely unnecessary and only exists because it's a simple form of labor organization that allows capital to maintain control. Like who gives a shit about that, really? No one should care about "jobs", if we're talking about an ideal society (obviously you have to care in practical terms but we're talking theoretically here).
"Oh some people find work meaningful", of course they do! Everyone does, in various ways. But you don't need a job to do work! I feel like our society is just like... Broken, in that we feel it's normal and good that someone sacrifices the majority of their entire life doing something that they would not have chosen to do if it wasn't an economic necessity. I get why you'd want to figure out the best way to do that because that's the current reality, but I think we'd all agree that our current reality is pretty fucking far from ideal.
Anyways I know that I just did babies first antiwork rant but still... I just don't get how anyone could defend the current framework given any kind of alternative, and AI definitely represents the possibility of an actual alternative.
What would you have done if you couldn't launch your business? Because that's the choice most people will have if AI takes their skilled career away. There will be fewer and fewer fields to go into so they will pay less. Our governments will never ask AI companies to give up their profits for anything but the bare minimum so we'll be forced to work in one of those remaining jobs. We are bringing back kings and peasants and the kings will be impossible to topple because they will be able to watch your every move unceasingly. AI can be massively beneficial, but we are pouring all of the investing into thw pockets of people we have seen can't be trusted with it.
I am with you. People don't know what they would do when they have nothing to do. When we were kids we didnt worry about bullshit like meaning. We just lived life. That was our meaning till we were sold a bullshit lie told to us over and over.
Same thing here. You could make it your life's work to see all the must see places in the world. Live a life of novelty, adventure, and enjoyment and if AI slowed down aging and made us live 200 years, you'd still not see it all in your lifetime.
You could do that with so many activities as well. You could spend a lifetime of reading and never read everything that catches your interest. You could spend a lifetime in a genre of music and still have things to discover. You could dedicate your life to planting new plants or native plants in an area and never finish. Hell, you might be able to space travel. All I see is failure of imagination.
It’s your leverage in society. People being needed means that they can’t simply be walked over by everyone else. The future that you are envisioning is one in which no one has the ability to overcome their current life circumstance. The circumstance might be great in your mind, but if they don’t like it, there is literally nothing they can do. I don’t mean nothing they can do nowadays. It’s currently very difficult for people to move up and down in the social hierarchy obviously, I mean that it will literally become impossible.
Also the vast majority of wealthy people still work. I like my job very much and I think a huge number of other people do too. Not having to work is one thing. Not being able to work is terrible.
Can you describe a situation where it would be impossible for someone to move across the social hierarchy of value in that system? Or overcome their life circumstance?
For example someone who trades for fish and finds it inequitable can simply go and make a fishing pole and catch his own fish? This seems like someone could very easily overcome that circumstance without the need for an artificial "job" classification or pay.
I completely agree with 100% of everything you have said. The only reason I see for jobs being necessary is because that is always how it has been throughout all of human history, we have always had to work to survive, whether it was hunting, gathering or farming. It was and so far is, an unfortunate fact of life. That being said, work now is so far removed from hunting and survival that it can feel more like slave labour and most of us have lost all autonomy. If we could remove the need from work in life, we would be removing one of the great curses of our existence.
Providing economic value is not the only way a human can find purpose. The concern shouldn't be "AI can solve all our problems and that's bad because them we won't have problems to solve". It should be "Our current economic system does not account for situations where almost nobody can leverage their skills to survive"
Who gives a fuck. Respectfully. This is already the case for like 80% of the world's population forced to "find purpose" doing shitty low-wage jobs and still somehow fund a dignified life.
"people need purpose to live happy and fulfilling lives" is what gatekeeping elitists c-words say when they realise they'll have to be average for once in their lives and nothing petrifies them more.
I hear this often, but I feel like the people who are judged by society to be the most successful and who are often the most happy and give themselves the highest rankings on happiness and wellbeing are people who are at the height of their careers.
Giving people the option to work to improve their life standing is so essential to society that I genuinely think there will be a revolt on those exact grounds if people no longer have that option.
It’s not just the need to live happy and fulfilling lives, it’s being able to pass information down from generation to generation. What if it all fails someday? No one will know how to solve a lot of problems based on not just lack of information but lack of experience.
“We cannot build society on a language we do not understand”
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Almost no one really understands 99.99% of everyday tech from iPhones to airplanes, but it just works so we trust it.
As AI solves increasingly complex problems, it’s likely some of those solutions may be too complex for human understanding. I suspect we’ll rapidly shift from demanding understanding to just ensuring it works like the AI said it would.
The argument is that OpenAI stole the work of the mathematicians who were working on their platform. Not that's it isn't capable or helpful but that the lab stole their work and built on it while trying to silence them via a payoff.
That was the purpose to flood humans with information so the verifications cannot be done timely and meanwhile OpenAI is gaslighting the media and the masses
It's funny how half the people who are mad about this are mad that now mathematicians have nothing to do and the other half are mad they have too much to do.
Either it's important and it's great the they're solved or it's not and the can just ignore them. Can't be both.
I saw the presentation of one medal fields and he says that by solving all their research work (according to him all the ten famous great math problems have been solved to him) it completely jeopardizes mathematician careers and young phd students and masters are in an existencial crisis… this is causing more pain than happy discoveries…at least this is my opinion, for sure some will say they just have to adapt but when you have spent decades studying to have an ai at the end that ruins all your work… For sure the medal fields mentioned that many of the mathematicians will convert themselves into „AI Math Translators“ as many papers published are still too complicated even for mathematicians… i just cannot prevent to think that it is ruining the culture of long study/thinking effort, it encourages the mind laziness…
That applies to all jobs that require cognitive skills. Eventually an AI will be better at all of them. Yet nobody is talking about the implications of a world where the value of human knowledge is becoming less and less. I fear for what that will do to people and society as a whole if people are not needed anymore for a productive society.
Mathematicians at open ai used ai and read 40000 methematicians' scripts to deliver these. I don't see how this is not good for math, other than that the notation apparently is hard to read. The world didn't stop when we could calculate pi, or used the abacus or calculator, or high compute simulations. Wtf you think THIS is?
OpenAI basically did a brute force run in Lean- and apparently it compiles. But the ‘proofs’- the key thing being that they are a communication between humans that are understandable and can be recognized as proofs- aren’t.
So, we’ve got code that compiles to hit the reward function (fucking great), and… a mess for the exploitability of that code and whether it actually works as a proof. Which given an LLM is about language and human interface, is pretty poor.
You’d think they would be happy that it is helping with the workload. We still need them to check the proofs/solutions because “AI” is far from perfect.
If math was just about solving equations, we would have been done a long time ago. We can get numerical results to an arbitrary precision, but that is not the point.
One single number being hallucinated somewhere along the way would invalidate the whole thing as you'd need a human to act as controller. Making it eventually pointless to even have AI do it in the first place.
If one number is wrong then any number could be wrong.
AI is and will always be a maid, a servant and an assistant. Nothing more.
This isn't true though. 3 results got retracted from 1 improper sign mistake but the rest of the results so far stand and the biggest results like Hilberts 10th over Rationals have Lean formalizations I'm pretty sure
first they came for the data input analyst, i did not say anything for that was not my job, then they came for the software developer but i did not say anything for that was not my job, then they came for the mathematicians, but i was a mathematician and there was no one to care LOL
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