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  turzmo
  Much of math (or science) research has the strange quality of being mostly curiosity-driven, but having giant benefits that occasionally spin out to the public.Some questions are more urgent and practical. My feeling is that the more directly practical a question is, the more likely the research community is to support AI usage in that question.The annoying thing about recent AI advances is that they target questions on the wrong end of the spectrum: Erdos problems are exactly the sort of "useless" questions that people might answer purely for the love of the game. The sort of questions that a young person might cut their teeth on and gain confidence.Solving questions like these automatically, I think, is not good for the long-term health of research. At least for the foreseeable future you still would like people to become interested and develop skills in these fields. These developments, and especially how they are presented, directly discourage that.
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  Spacecosmonaut
  Accelerationists may argue that the eroding of proper attribution and proof verification by humans is a meaningless short term struggle of a dying field.Mathematics seems to be entering an era where human + machine maximizes performance, much like chess in the 1990s. However, imagine a future where even talented mathematicians are nothing but noise in the machine (as is the case in chess now). A future where AI generates and verifies proofs without humans in the loop. Where the mathematics may be beyond human comprehension.In that future, does it matter that early career mathematicians are inhibited by these developments? Perhaps not. Programming faces the same issue. As AI crawls up the competence ladder, does it matter that fewer people have opportunities to develop the skillset of a senior engineer? Perhaps not.
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  silveraxe93
  > However, the declaration argues math is more than a machine for producing correct answers.There might be more to maths than that, but that is definitely the most important part. I love science funding. But not because it's a jobs program for nerds.
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  modriano
  > “The tech industry proceeds in accordance with commercial logic, which is antithetical to the values of mathematics,” declaration co-author Michael Harris of Columbia UniversityAs a former physicist and current data scientist/engineer, I know for a fact that commercial utility drives math research and researchers.Math is a tool to solve problems. Some mathematicians might only love the process of using the tool, but commercial logic absolutely drives mathematician attention to develop commercially useful tools.
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  bandrami
  My vague prediction right now is that in five years LLMs will be heavily used by universities in grant-funded math research but nobody else will be able to afford it, much like supercomputer clusters 25 years ago.
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  1970-01-01
  Why is it wrong to expect humans (mathematicians) to adapt here? AI is already producing solutions to problems that humans could not find. Culture holds value until it does not.
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  Dilettante_
  >and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sakeExcept when someone hands you a magic button that just gives you knowledge?[at least in the framing of this "warning"] Then it's about peoples' livelihoods, about "culture", etc?"Computer" used to be a job. Did science on the whole lose or gain by making these clerks obsolete?
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  phyzix5761
  Is it possible they feel threatened their jobs are at stake?
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  TrackerFF
  I've said it before, but there's a massive risk that we simply stop educating researchers. So much of a Ph.D revolves around the person learning how to do research.They learn how to read papers and literature rigorously. They get low-hanging fruits to practice on, which can take months. Their funding doesn't come from thin air either.So what happens when the group leaders would rather spend money on compute, and get models to solve the low-hanging fruit? Which the models could very well do in mere hours, compared to months.Nor does it help that publishing is the number 1 measure in academia. Furthermore, the access to compute and capital could end up be the defining factor between researchers and research groups.It is basically the "junior problem", but even more severe.
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  knollimar
  Math for non mathematicians is a tool. Math for mathemeticians is an art in the same way an artisan takes pride in his work.That's why there's a disconnect when you go from math for engineers to the stuff above it. It feels less useful and very different
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  Myrmornis
  > AI-generated papers could overwhelm peer-review systems with low-quality workThat's not a problem unique to math, or even to academia. It's a problem in every context in human life where people communicate via written documents.
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  fooker
  I'm curious about whether we will start discovering new maths in the next few years that provide insight into unsolved CS or Physics problems!
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  tcdent
  Isn't the whole point of the field of mathematics in a theoretical sense the pursuit of formal solutions?So, why would they be advocating for limitations on arriving at solutions?
• rramadass
  Mathematician Ken Ono (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Ono) gives a well nuanced viewpoint on AI in Mathematics (and more) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGZOi-7haCwHe states that he struggled to come up with problems which would be challenging for AI to solve (at the below site) and thus forced to accept that mathematicians have to rethink their profession.FrontierMath: Benchmarking AI against advanced mathematical research by Epoch AI - https://epoch.ai/frontiermathAs a follow up to the above, see "First Proof: Mathematicians Putting AI to the Test" featuring eminent mathematicians - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaICCTpkI7Q
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  cryo32
  As a mathematician by trade I think they’re overblowing it. You can choose to use it or not. I choose not to because I enjoy the process. But I’m not doing formal research or getting paid to do it these days.I will note that the average corporate mathematical modelling is usually a fucking circus so adding AI might make it better.
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  dhfbshfbu4u3
  In a year, none of this will really matter. Intelligence is now a scalable resource independent of biological constraints. Everyone will use it because the system will no longer afford them the luxury of time. In a decade (maybe sooner), references won’t matter either.
• freakynit
  """ However, the declaration argues math is more than a machine for producing correct answers. The discipline, its authors believe, is a deeply human endeavor built on creativity, understanding, collaboration, and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Those values often clash with the incentives driving AI development. “The tech industry proceeds in accordance with commercial logic, which is antithetical to the values of mathematics,” declaration co-author Michael Harris of Columbia University told The New York Times. """I mean, what field doesn't? Everyone works to make money.Slightly unrelated, but, their website "https://leidendeclaration.ai/" itself gives an eerie feeling of being built by Sonnet. That color scheme and the layout is what Sonnet chooses by default most of the times.
• Theodores
  From the article:> However, the declaration argues math is more than a machine for producing correct answers. The discipline, its authors believe, is a deeply human endeavor built on creativity, understanding, collaboration, and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.Generation X was the last generation that had 'general knowledge', as in an abundance of fairly useful information stored in 'grey matter' that could be recalled quickly. When search engines came along there really wasn't much need to know anything since most things could be looked up. However, you still had to think.With LLMs, thinking is kind-of optional. This really is an existential threat to our intelligence since 'use it or lose it applies'. I am glad these mathematicians are doing their duty as canary in the coal mine.
• ChrisArchitect
  [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48380670
• spwa4
  Actual "warning":https://leidendeclaration.ai/Far more interesting as it's outlaying a set of principles for using AI to augment human involvement and science, rather than replacement.
• sylware
  Are maths AI models now using "tools", aka formal solvers?I understand that the "language interface" of a "maths AI" could be some specialized trained LLM (Large Language Model) that to convey, with human language, "high level" mathematical mental contructs and intuition.But then, you would need some models which does the reasoning using formal mathematical solvers (and probably a ton of "scratch" memory, it would be interesting to see how those models end up storing "mathematical" lema data). I guess you can have ML (Machine Learning) for those models on 'general maths', but also we can think about more mathematically focused ML for a specific problem, area, etc. And in the end, ML for maths, would it be mostly permutations of truth statements fed to a neural net?When we were talking about "AI", one decade ago, that was what most had in mind (it may help a bit in physics, but it seems less likely, because reality/experiments are hard to teach to "AI"s).If that becomes a reality (aka easy hardware access, and some "working" models), mathematicians will have to be as good in maths than in maths ML. And this is were there is an issue: training honestely good mathematical human brains may become very hard with some broad availability of good general maths reasoning "AIs".
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  ck2
  I still don't understand how "AI" is ready for serious use beyond entertainment purposesEvery time I ask ChatGPT to make a table for a subject I know well, I will find an error in one of the results and it is very confident about it until I question it in detailEvery time I ask ChatGPT for nutritional breakdown of some dense food source and give it a quantity like 8 ounces and ask for the weight of each ingredient, the weights will be wrong and add up to more than the original weight of 8 ouncesThese are variations of the old "how many Rs in strawberry" problem, it's still not solved, "AI" cannot reassemble a complex problem properlyA lot of what it tells me in detail about some subjects sounds suspiciously like Reddit posts reassembled out of order
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  juleiie
  I will argue that AI and flood of low quality slop makes genuine human work more valuable, not less.The ability to clearly outmatch trillion dollar machines is a very unique satisfaction. I even write ordinary internet comments with an intention to make them clearly better and more fun to read than boring Claude output.
• voxleone
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• xuanlin314
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• embirdating
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• embirdating
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  meindnoch
  Another mathematician already predicted this, but you didn't listen. His name was Theodore Kaczynski. It's time to reap what you've sown.
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  atleastoptimal
  This is all contingent on AI forays into mathematics being slop and low quality. However it's clear that recent AI models are capable of genuine mathematical achievements which surpass the frontier of what humans are able to accomplish (wrt the unit distance Erdos problem).The issue is, how is a group of intellectuals, whose identity derives from their ability to do something rare, useful, and requires many years to get good at, react when a machine can produce all of their useful output nearly automatically, can verify its own outputs, and is getting better exponentially? It is the complete annihilation of one's sense of value and purpose when the binding element to your culture is commodified.I think there will be a lot of arguments trying to claim that the point of mathematics is curiosity, or that there is always some ineffable human element that AI can't replicate, but I fail to see how somehow these wishy-washy human centered values somehow mean anything compared to the amoral pursuit of mathematical truth, which has nothing to do with humans.It's just that we humans happened to be the only beings in the universe good at math until ~2025. Now there is another species which can do many of the things we do, and it is not bound by the size of the human brain, our short term memories, or the architectural limits of biological computation. To imagine that humans would retain supremacy in this very un-human like discipline seems like wishful thinking.