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  tmhn2
  As a mathematician maybe I am a little more optimistic than this declaration.I am thinking of Mochizuki's abc conjecture: He worked in relative isolation, and dumped a huge incomprehensible proof on the community (to oversimplify a bit). That's not totally unlike what might happen if AI generates a huge, incomprehensible proof of let's say RH.Well, what is the result? In the Mochizuki case, it was a lot of skepticism, but it also generated conferences, papers, talks in the hallway, discussions with students, and so on--a flurry of exactly that kind of community process that the declaration says is the main driver of mathematics.Ultimately we think a fatal flaw was found in Mochizuki's proof, so it didn't lead anywhere in particular. But in our hypothetical "AI lean-verified proof of RH" situation, it would presumably generate substantially more of that community activity we saw in the Mochizuki situation. And if it's correct, that community activity would be productive (expository talks, students given problems to flesh out or generalize, etc).Maybe mathematics just becomes a little more like other fields--relying on labs with lots of money for compute, digging through a corpus of AI-generated proofs, etc.
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  jeremysalwen
  To me it doesn't seem like what AI has destroyed is the ability for mathematicians to develop understanding and share it with each other, but rather it's destroyed the yardstick (solving open problems) that has traditionally been used to measure how much they have contributed to that understanding.I do see how this is a problem in terms of assigning credit, but I think the cat is already out of the bag in terms of these models being capable. Even without AI labs spending millions of dollars to solve millennium prize problems, there are plenty of other people who will use them to pick low hanging fruit. I don't think any social solution is going to make things go back to the way they were, where you could share your progress towards a famous open problem without risking someone "scooping" you within a couple of days.I think that the most likely outcomes are either mathematics becomes more secretive, or there is a more deliberative approach to assigning credit than who was "first" to solve some problem. In the former case, this may slow down progress, and in the latter case, this could mean that credit would become more subjective, and be a continual source of controversy.
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  david-gpu
  Tao's critique of AI in the field of mathematics reminds me of what French art critic Charles Baudelaire said in the 19th century about photography [0].Baudelaire argued that photography became a haven for failed painters, the sorts of hacks that could not finish proper training. Photography, as a mechanical rendering of the world, could only record what already existed; it couldn't transform reality the way a painting could.He also criticized the public's craze for "rushing" into it, and complained that this technical "progress" was weakening the arts.Do you see some parallels as well?[0] https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Curiosit%C3%A9s_esth%C3%A9tiq...
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  gwd
  This sounds a lot to me like people in the 90's complaining that computers were destroying chess. Thirty years later, chess is more popular than it ever was, and chess players are better than they ever have been. I wouldn't be surprised if there are now more chess books now than there ever have been. Furthermore, it turns out that a lot of chess books written before computers were just wrong about a lot of things. It turns out having an oracle for the "right" answer in chess, even without an explanation, used properly, allows humans to develop broader, more accurate insights.The argument here sounds similar. The fear, as I understand this statement to be saying, is that by being given the correct answer, in the form of a 100-page Lean proof, humans will be robbed of the chance to from insights about the structure of mathematics itself. I don't see any reason that humans can't continue to develop insights as they try to digest the 100-page Lean proof into something more manageable; but with more certainty and fewer false starts.
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  yzydserd
  > solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight.This is the effect of AI on most intellectual disciplines, and it’s a real worry.
• Animats
  There's an unpopular branch of mathematics which does not have infinities - finiteism.[1] The constructive version of finitism takes the position that there is no such thing as infinity, just arbitrarily large upper bounds. You can have theorems about arbitrarily large numbers, but you never get 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 ... = 2 The benefit of finitism is that it escapes undecidability.The big objection to finiteism is that it's a lot more work. Infinity swallows many special cases. Proofs get longer without infinity, and most of the special cases are uninteresting. That's not a problem for AIs.Someone may start up an AI and make it grind through Hilbert's program for putting mathematics on a fully consistent foundation, starting from a finiteism base. This is a huge, unrewarding job. Great for machine work.[1] https://encyclopediaofmath.org/wiki/Finitism
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  boron1006
  To be honest I didn’t get that much outrage here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662116It seems like a lot of the issue here is that these problems aren’t interesting in and of themselves, but they lead down interesting roads. It defeats the purpose if you solve them without getting any real understanding.It’s akin to saying you’ve solved “pancake flipping” problems with a waffle maker, or “travelling salesman” problems with a zoom meeting.
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  Strilanc
  This letter is complaining that human understanding has been crucial to advancing of mathematics, and AI companies are not bothering with it. But the promise (and horror) of AI mathematics is that, if it succeeds, human understanding becomes irrelevant. That's the goal. So this letter's message will fall on deaf ears.Keep in mind employees at AI companies are publicly stating that they believe they're risking a >10% chance of human extinction. They're knowingly risking the lives of every man, woman, and child to continue the work. The lives of their own sons and daughters. A person already rationalizing that isn't going to shed a tear for the careers of mathematicians. Just a bug on the windshield.
• andai
  So what's the actual point here? It's too fast and we can't keep up?Isn't that just a function of the technology itself, and the same problem being faced by every other field? And going to get exponentially "worse" every year!Or is the issue that they're bad at explaining things, in a way that produces actual learning? (e.g. AI is amazing for learning but the net effect on students so far appears to be negative.)
• ggm
  To me, the "meaning" of proof is twofold. First is the understanding which is completely absent from a proof which depends on exhaustive iterations of instances or is asserted by fiat from myriad individually contestable paths. That's what I think makes AI proofs risky: they absence of understanding.The second is the utility. We get to do navigation because the maths about angles and spheres checks out. The social utility downstream of AI proofs may be huge.I don't like this disjunction.
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  trillobyte
  OpenAI: "Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."- Except the mathematicians who we'll scoop and cause existential dread among their entire field.- Except the software developers. They'll need to become plumbers or live on UBI.- Except the people in countries that can't afford the cost of AI tokens to keep up with the rest of the world.Just keep picking off groups of humans for the "benefits of all humanity"... while building larger and larger disparities been the have a lots and the just have enoughs.We're going to build humans a utopia but along the way we'll leave a trail of destruction because that's not our problem.
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  fwlr
  In internet culture there’s this phrase “Hydrogen Bomb vs Coughing Baby”, meant to highlight the absurd power difference between two combatants.In almost any scenario even tangentially involving mathematics, twenty-five Fields medallists uniting to denounce something would be a veritable Tsar Bomba.It should give you pause that here they feel like the ailing infant.
• doubtfuluser
  Im surprised about the sentiment in this discussion.I totally see the problem Terence is describing. We are loosing a lot in understanding and focus if it continues like that. The solution found for Navier Stokes doesn’t have much „real value“ - but what almost always happened in the past when people worked on the difficult problems, these sparked new ideas / new theorems that broadened our knowledge. Think back at your grad studies, figuring out a proof as homework was hard, sometimes incredibly hard, but while doing it we gained a lot of understanding how things work. Now asking AI for the solution and „just“ getting it, risks our understanding, our creativity and our ability to connect the dots with other territories. I see it in students nowadays, there is much less understanding, much less creativity in finding solutions. I truly think this „short-path“ solution with the „death of struggle is one of the biggest risks with AI already for human development
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  adastra22
  Mathematics is about discovering and understanding the logical implications of assumed axioms under various inference rules.Alternatively, some claim that mathematics is about understanding these implications.Under the first definition, AI is already, and forevermore will be faster and better at proving theorems. Just like it is better at checkers, chess, and now go.The author asserts that AI proofs are incomprehensible to humans, and so under the second definition AI is merely a tool to overcome one hurdle on the way to understanding.So which is it? The author seems to claim the second definition, but bemoan the end of mathematics under the first.
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  datakan
  Everyones outraged all the time. It doesn't mean anything anymore. It's that meme from years ago about the red ants and the black ants living in a box peacefully until someone shakes the box and they start trying to kill each other. They go after each other and not the one shaking the box.OpenAI/Anthropic are shaking the box.
• ianjbutler
  > We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work, with misalignment between the outcome of the use of AI and its initial purpose. In many fields and activities, years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas. However, building on a vast body of previous human work, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of producing the results of such work directly, and these goals cease to align.This is about how good taste in both research direction and in design are essential to steering AI, but we have no plan at all for instilling that taste in students or practitioners in a post-AI world.> The issues the mathematical community faces now are similar to issues that other scientific and creative professions are facing, and indicate issues that all of humanity might face: how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place.Besides eroding taste and taste-building, this is about just how useful friction is as signal.Everyone coding with AI knows it routes around difficulties like a river around a stone, which is not necessarily a good thing. It will do it tirelessly 1000 times instead of learning anything from it. AND if the AI does not fail in this, the human driver will get no signal, and never know it happened. This seems to be getting worse, not better.. my theory is that more models are cross-trained on cybersecurity stuff where the goal is success and the method doesn't matter. Fine for pen-testing, ultimately pretty bad for coherent code or math or physics.Discrete tasks where we don't want to be bothered is a real use-case, but optimizing for it everywhere is terrible for the future of durable abstractions that we can build on and ratchet up our understanding with. Bad for the models too eventually! They can maintain a codebase with millions of special cases or juggle tons of free variables in equations, but that just encourages bad abstractions.. they have a ceiling for this too, even if it's higher than humans.
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  demibabs
  > I am proud to be among the list of 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists — to the declaration belowI wonder if there’s a Fields Medalist group chat.
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  oytis
  Looks like mathematicians (like people in many other professions) have to redefine what their work means and how to define success. Hard to agree that a tool that can find a proof is detrimental by itself, rather it voids some assumptions people relied on previously
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  XTXinverseXTY
  Puts the onus on the AI companies to provide a specific replacement mechanism, no? Unless I'm unfamiliar with something else he's written that proposes something more specific and constructiveTo Tao’s credit he obviously identified the problem very clearly and admits understandably "we did not have the time to have a more consultative process, as with Leiden; but we decided that the urgency of the situation was such that we needed to release a statement sooner rather than later".
• newprint
  The level of things happening in the last several months is just SciFi level, especially last two weeks. 1. Overlords of AI threatening to destroy someone if their demands aren't met over the Millennia problem. Proving the point that given the chance, owners of the AI companies will immediately use their power to squash or control other people. (See Butlerian Jihad) 2. At least for me, the Exponential progress didn't sound true until this week. If AI indeed solved all those problems and proofs and solutions are correct, we went from "Write me English 101 college essays" to "Help me solve the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem" in a just 3-4 years. 3.Looks like someone's work might have been stolen, by AI company and there are strong evidence. See point 1. 4. War between AI & AI companies. 5. It produces a machine verifiable LEAN proofs for the hardest problems know to us !!! Proving that point that best use of AI so far is to create verifiable systems. I.e the absolutely chaotic AI creates verifiable (orderly) proofs. It is Maxwell Demon: chaos to order.
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  Art9681
  This reads like people lamenting a bygone era and making a desperate attempt to bring it back. I'm sorry. Outside of the good ol' boys club, no one cares about some process they've romanticized simply because "that's how its always been done". Absolute nonsense.We are moving forward and if that means no human wins a fields medal because they didnt spend three decades working on a problem that could be solved in three days, the world will be better for it.
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  linhvn
  And I am outraged by their dinosaur mindset and the gatekeeping mentality that force every student to follow their same archaic system that no longer makes sense 20 years ago, let alone now.
• nadermx
  Back in the day you could think of a cool idea. I don't know maybe a plane that could fly without drag. To even see if this was feasable you had to understand physics, engineering, and then from there you had to have a math person see if it was actually possible.Now, I can ask ChatGPT about this and get back a proof that shows "a passive airframe cannot sustain zero-drag motion through still, viscous air"So, I think if anything now, Maths has changed for the better. More ideas can be proven false or true from a get go instead of wasting so much to see if its even feasible to find out it isn't.Progress if anything is about to leap frog anything we have ever known.
• drivebyhooting
  All “fields medalist” signatories - a rarefied and elitist group indeed.I wish this letter could be more egalitarian and include the view points of those who AREN’T the beneficiaries of a highly competitive winner-take-all system.Since the common narrative is that AI frees up labor to do other things (engineering -> trades), maybe we can celebrate that genius mathematicians will now spend time teaching children how to be as smart as them?
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  kenjackson
  "how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place."That sounds like an "us problem", not an AI or OpenAI/Anthropic problem.
• moktonar
  OpenAI should just apologize for having been too greedy. That’s it, as simple as it gets. The fact that it never will is the biggest red flag.
• BeetleB
  Lots of Fields medalists signing this. Interesting to see one not there: Timothy Gowers.
• hbcdbff
  I have never, and I mean never, seen such a declaration have any effect whatsoever.
• manlymuppet
  Somewhat unrelated: is it wrong to say mathematics is not art, and that there is always a right answer? I know that's not romantic, but maybe it's true.Before LLMS, programming was something I might've said required creativity and human input to do properly. It's not that creativity or human input isn't valuable anymore, but AI has forced me to realize that coding is much a means to an end, and that all things considered, the end matters much more than the means.If we can make important mathematics progress faster and better with LLMs, I think it's wise not to fret over an apparent loss of our humanity. Perhaps that's only a loss we want to have.
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  iamkeithmccoy
  There's a reason mathematics is generally within liberal arts programs rather than science programs. Mathematics is the art of logic. Yes, sometimes mathematics becomes incredibly useful but most mathematics is never applied.Compare that with computer science. Most of the work we do in software engineering is in service of an applicable output - software products that facilitate processes or bring in revenue. Turning up the dial on AI gets companies to these outputs faster.Turning up AI on mathematics helps solve conjectures and can provide new insights. But it has a major misalignment with the purpose of mathematics which is largely intellectualism.
• sim04ful
  Playing a devil's advocate. Why do we need understanding ? To take an example i would say ~99% of the population do not understand how combustion engines or how semiconductors work, what say another 1% ? Is the fear post-apocalyptic in nature ? We need some human priesthood to carry on tradition ? why ?Let's assume in the next decade GPT-7 PRO Ultra is cheaply ubiquitous, inspectable, reproducible, transferable, reasonably un-constrained by any institutional interests.What say the 1% ?Lifted up my comment for addition visibility
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  metanoia_
  In the Economist article Tao links, Hugo Duminil-Copin, draws a comparison: airdropping someone on the summit of Mount Everest is very different from climbing it.The fundamental issue with AI solving any perceived difficult problem is that we have lost the journey. The sight atop Mount Everest looks much different when you have climbed compared to being dropped from above.
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  jonahx
  The concerns seem valid.I'm unclear what the ask is, though. What, even in theory, is a practical and realistic fix?
• AppAttestationz
  Any proof for or against a mathematical conjecture, bruteforced by AI can be the spark for new insights. I'll concede that to the AI companies.But I agree with the sentiment that the marketing behind these "discoveries" is disingenious. They pretend they solved the problem, but it still takes a bunch of humans to reduce the solution to a simplified and sensible explanation.
• HarHarVeryFunny
  That has to be the most impressive endorsement list any declaration has ever seen!25 Fields medallists! Wow!
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  johnnyApplePRNG
  The average programmer is outraged by OpenAI's methods, too.I don't care how good Astra or any subsequent models they may release might be... I am never going back to those token reset shenanigans.
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  rossant
  > ... 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists —As a non-native English speaker, I initially understood this to mean that all living Fields Medallists had signed. I later realized that it meant only that all the signatories were Fields Medallists.(Apparently, there are 47 living Fields Medallists today.)
• heyitsdaad
  An experiment I would like to see:Train an LLM with no advanced math texts: only basic math up to 6th grade, conversational text and literary works.Interact with it (you cannot refer to anything past 6th grade math since you don't know it yourself) and get it to propose a solution to a real world problem. e.g., come up with RSA to practically secure communication.
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  whatever1
  At some point we will lose track of all the ai discoveries that are worth remembering.Academia with the publication system had a way of retrieving old discoveries and build upon them.If my LLM session found something groundbreaking in between the billion tokens it produced, how would you ever know?
• throwaway713
  Contrarian take: I think the ability of AI to produce valid mathematical proofs (even inscrutable ones) is absolutely fantastic. Mathematics as a profession does not have a monopoly over math itself any more than professional pianists have a monopoly on who plays piano, when they play, and how.I have sympathy for any jobs that might be affected (much as my own job has become more tenuous in software engineering). And if the field is disrupted by chaos that makes the research process unproductive, that's bad too and should of course be handled by applying better organization within the institutions that tend to perform mathematical research.But to a large degree, the notion that "sloppy AI proofs are bad for mathematics research" seems like a total failure of the imagination to me. Attempting to find shorter proofs or more elegant proofs can be turned back in on itself via proof theory. There are proofs in Presburger arithmetic that are doubly exponential in the length of the sentence. Yet a more powerful theory like PA makes quick work of such theorems. The explainability or "subjective beauty" of a proof can be quantified and optimized against. Optimization itself can be optimized against. I really don't understand how this magical ability to know the truth of more theorems much more quickly—even via an "ugly" route—is anything but a net positive.
• modeless
  Taking a snapshot of the state of AI math right now and concluding that it will be net negative to human understanding and insight in the future is very short sighted. This statement will be used to promote ideas and actions that will ultimately be disastrous for our country.
• cat-whisperer
  chain of credit is important, and plagiarism is harmful.But is science/mathematics ultimately a pursuit of knowledge, or a pursuit of recognition?Recognition helps keep people motivated, but that shouldn't be the pursuit of science or mathematics.
• pelican0
  Given the existence of this technology now and the incentives of the AI companies, both of which are not going away; what's a good future here?A major part of the complaint is that there's no conceptual understanding and building of new ideas coming out of the AI proofs, thus defeating the purpose of the original pursuit.If in 2027 the AI models start producing, with every mathematics or science breakthrough they make, well-written documents tailored for human understanding, with intermediate concepts, expositions of failed-but-once-promising paths, etc. Would that be good alignment with the mathematics community?
• chunky1994
  This is really well written and exposes a core tension between science and something akin to engineering. The "engineering" of proofs has become "easy" (a compute and $) problem, rather than hard (a time and conception problem).Without the ability to do things the "hard" way it is difficult to figure out if doing things the "easy" way will help us advance the frontier of math and science.I may be wrong but historically we had this version of science discovery for a long while (empirical observation and brute force application) rather than first principles leading to applications (tools, the wheel, mills etc). Then somewhere along the way it flipped after Newton and the enlightenment period and started understanding first principles before they become engineering applications.Perhaps it is not required, and we can just keep doing things the "easy" way like we used to, or we might find ourselves out of the ability to brute force things and then we go back to needing to do this the hard way, at which point this period of AI brute forcing would be seen as a detriment.
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  bobzowak
  This is really only a short-term problem where the AI companies only have the internal models that can solve these. In the “long” term, which could honestly mean months, everyone will have access to Bel/C/D-level models capable of solving these anyway.
• Eduard
  A Severe Misalignment of AI in human-centered Mathematics
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  mosura
  If you internalise that AI might actually reach super intelligence then logically the question becomes "so what exactly are humans for if literally everything can be done better by machines?". Then mathematics and all intellectual work, as argued for here, becomes quite clearly a recreational pursuit.
• G3nD
  I kind of expected a sober stoicism from mathematicians. Feels silly in retrospect. This is just the math version of the "anti-ai" movement by "artists".
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  qarl
  Is this really any different than the problem in software engineering - where AI is doing the work of junior programmers and now they aren't getting the development they need?Seems the same to me. And it'll be the same in all industries soon enough. And then it won't just be the junior people.All the same problem: what do people do now?
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  pred_
  Seeing how /r/singularity and /r/accelerate are leaking into maths forums, I foresee a wave of comments that fail to understand Tao's message, whether on purpose or not, so let's try to be clear here:Tao is not someone who is anti-AI for the sake of being anti-AI. He has been advocating for the usefulness of AI in maths for a long time, to the point that people have started calling him a shill for the commercial companies.And everyone agrees that there are plenty of use cases to be had; helping with less interesting tasks like easing literature review, efficiently delving into existing work, doing review, whether on your own work or that of others, prototyping algorithms in areas where computation is useful, but also more in hands-on aspects of maths like validating potential proof directions by getting quick feedback on veracity of lemmas, etc., and, on very rare occasions, being able to one-shot the problem you care about.The point he is trying to make here is much more subtle than "AI bad", and it's probably easy to miss if you have never engaged with research in maths: it's that the particular approach that large commercial companies have opted to take to produce marketing material can be a net negative. There is not doubt that -- even if you ignore the rampant plagiarism that has been reported across multiple problems now, the unethical attempts to oust authors, the outrageous attempts to scoop researchers instead of collaborating with them and building on existing projects -- it's nifty to have a machine that can help you figure out if a proposition is true or not. But just figuring out as much was never the point. When people have built problem lists, it's because some problems are more likely than others to provide new insight, and that insight is the target. And to than end, a poorly written paper with inadequate references and a pile of Lean is not valuable at all. Yes, now we know with higher certainty that Fermat's Last Theorem is true, but everyone expected that already.One place where "just" answering the question can be a net negative is because the current incentive structure is set up in such a way that going in afterwards, trying to reclaim and extract the insights from a brute force solution, is considered less valuable work than that of coming up with a solution in the first place. That's a problem of incentives, and something Tao himself has addressed in e.g. his ICM talk, and that's something that we'll want to do something about. Until a better structure appears, though, if any given commercial provider of large language models really wants to help out with maths research and not just make more pre-IPO marketing material by competing with their customers, they could do so by using their magic machines to help build insight instead.
• Absonsonson
  For some reason, every time I see something like that, I get major Ted Kaczynski vibes.
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  throwaway85825
  Academics should never leak their research to ClosedAI lest their work be stolen. Universities and corporations will have to build their own compute to not have their data stolen.
• lbrito
  >Often these solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others.That's just capitalism seeping through a previously unexplored crack into academia, and attempting to do the only thing capitalism knows to do - maximize profits - with no additional concern.
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  tossandthrow
  On the contrary to what Tao believe, it seems like we need AI to move the needle on mathematics.> problems in many fields of mathematicsDeveloping these different fields moves complexity from the field itself to the interactions of these fields.Getting too preoccupied with the established terminology risks us a local minima.Anf because the field overall has become so complex that we need to decompose into subfields, there will be a good chance that we will not, as individuals, have the capacity to truly see progress.The map has become so big that we need better tools to work with it.
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  sim04ful
  "We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work, with misalignment between the outcome of the use of AI and its initial purpose"Suppose we eventually have GPT-7-class models running practically on $100 devices, with their activity transparent, inspectable, and reproducible. At that point, what exactly is left for us to fear from this threat?
• nythroaway048
  I was under the impression that mathematics (and science generally) had the primary goal of helping us understand our universe better than those who came before us.
• manlymuppet
  What changes exactly is this post asking for?
• gslepak
  I always wondered how Idiocracy got to the point where they have sophisticated technology and yet everyone is stupid. I think we have our answer.
• jsrozner
  For every benefit that sillycon valley has produced in the recent past, there have been many more harms. I am confident that this will be no different. Of course, benefits and harms depend on one's vantage point.
• road61
  It's a turning point for science and beyond. AI has shown itself to be transformative. Even today, it is already changing the how research in math (and other sciences) is conducted. In the near future, whether it is LLMs or some other superior method, its capabilities are only expected to grow. The time to ask the question is now: Will AI be arguably the best tool at scientist's disposal, or will it instead be paraded around as a super brain collective that no human or group of humans can compete with, discouraging entire new generations of future scientists from ever entering the field? The jury is out on this one.
• frozenseven
  Knowledge is not a private guild. And this revolution will not stop just because you're upset.What can be solved, will be solved. And that's a good thing.
• num42
  Title: Terence Tao - SAIR Competitions and the Future of Experimental Mathematicshttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rB9YOi3lb7w&pp=ygUSVGVycmVuY2U...
• grumpopotamus
  Could we develop new ways to develop understanding and explore new ideas, such as interacting with the models to explain and understand their proofs, as well as to brainstorm related directions to pursue?
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  WarmWash
  And here we all thought for sure that it was gonna be the "dumb" work to fall to the machines first.Human hubris really is something...
• azan_
  I know that this comment section is not astroturfed, but it’s really uncanny how different comments are today compared with thread about solving navier stoke
• anon
  undefined
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  dwa3592
  While I agree with this and appreciate Tao and other mathematicians to take the time to do this. There are similar concerns for many many other fields aka there is a general misalignment of technology. Take Software engineering for example, I can't believe there is a class of software engineers who wake up everyday and tell themselves, "today is the day I am going to automate the rest of my job".Lets forget the hyper intellectual fields like maths and software engineering for a moment. What about taxi drivers? The best minds in silicon valley wake up everyday to automate the jobs of taxi drivers - TFA can be reworded as - 'The misalignment of AI/Tech in Transportation'. Remember the Nepal disaster that happened a couple weeks ago - the largest cranes that they had were stuck in the mud and couldn't move. There were no tools which could help the rescue teams at that time. Its weird that billions have been spent on making a ride automated to make a taxi driver redundant but no improvement in tech for rescue teams.
• anon
  undefined
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  TTorler
  This is a Stephen Wolfram tier problem. I hope to read what he has to say on the matter in the near future.
• ex-aws-dude
  The thing is no one is stopping anyone from getting the same knowledge/understanding/insightIf those things are disincentivized because the original problem is “solved” and there is less prestige to motivate people doesn’t that say more about issues with the community of mathematicians than the AI
• 1ahsg16
  Open source developers have been used by corporations who took their code and created closed SaaS companies.Now it is the turn of mathematicians who voluntarily contribute ideas, strategies and almost finished proofs in their writings and prompts to closed PaaS (Plagiarism as a Service) companies.OSS developers have never been respected by the parasites, neither will mathematicians. Your Fields Medals do not protect you from tech bro narcissists. You are a human resource.
• alansaber
  I'm unsure how any sufficiently advanced AI would not lead to cognitive handoff/the described problems.
• Sol-
  The AI driven mode collapse of human thought advances. I am no skeptic or anti-AI, but this is definitely a concern I share. You even notice it in normal mundane tasks like programming, never mind the AI generated prose that we at least have become somewhat allergic to.It wouldn't be so bad if you could just sit it out and say "Oh well, once the labs get bored with marketable domain X, humans will remigrate and re-apply creativity to it", but by then the damage might have been done and a field destroyed as an occupation. I don't know what to do about it, but I appreciate calling out the cynical tone-deafness of the AI companies here.
• throwaway1921
  At some point someone is going to need to answer for "what happens when all intellect is hoarded by one or two companies?" It's pretty clear that these AI labs are basically stealing everyone's alpha.
• sroerick
  I wonder if we will see a mass (math) exodus of mathematicians to open weight models.
• anon
  undefined
• KwisatzHaderack
  Math, like art, it is more about the process and not the end result.
• arendtio
  The irony is that LLMs are, at their core, very much just applied math...
• postalcoder
  Odd framing by the economist. The open letter calls out "AI companies", not just OpenAI. Anthropic hasn't been a good neighbor either. > OpenAI appears to have gazumped Tristan Buckmaster (pictured) and Levent Alpöge, a duo of mathematicians labouring on the task. What's hilarious is that the economist has gobbled up Levent's disingenuous "this was just a personal project" narrative.https://mathandai.org
• flyinglizard
  In the savanna it’s not about who outruns the lion but who outruns their peers escaping the lion.Frontier labs need these headlines not for human progress but as beauty pageant for investors and government agencies. If they don’t do maths they’ll just go after other fields.So Terrance Tao here might be able to hold them off math but he won’t stop them from speedrunning STEM with similar consequences.We may be locking people out of these fields instead delegating everything to machines, and I don’t think the machines are good enough to assume that responsibility.
• jrowen
  This kinda reminds me of the documentary about the top Go master that got beaten by a computer in dramatic fashion and had an existential crisis. Man confronting his own limitations in the realm he previously ruled unchallenged, what a time to be alive.Nobody is going to care that the math isn't being done in the traditional way. The results speak for themselves, this is now a part of the landscape. No amount of hand-wringing is going to put the cat back in the bag. Adapt or perish.
• buellerbueller
  Terrence, youre a mathematician; now extend this to the general case: AI is misaligned (inherently) with humanity.
• aspatton01
  Everybody is okay with coders losing out to AI, but when it starts hitting their field then there is outrage. I love it.
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  gritzko
  There is a contradiction here, among many:1. it is hard to justify 20 years of education at this point,2. with no such people around, who will guide those (supposedly) supersmart machines?A. Ronacher (who builds harnesses for a living) complained today that he has no idea what Astra is doing. Imagine a bunch of slop kiddies facing an aging AI-generated codebase. Not to mention the maths.
• theahura
  First, what an incredible article. Just an extremely concise and clear explanation of all of the problems with AI right now.Second, wow, the list of signatories is like a whos-who of mathematicians.Third, I love the clearly intentional use of ‘alignment/misalignment’ language, applied to targeting the entire industry instead of AI in particular. I’ve said in the past that optimizers are substrate agnostic. Companies and governments can be misaligned, just in the same way AI can.Fourth, I'm not sure that we can stop the optimization machines. Not the LLMs, I mean the incentives that lead to companies implementing dark patterns, lying about addiction, securing effective monopolies through downright shady behavior, and generally trying to jailbreak the system instead of improve it
• nonsensical_
  Both Amodei and sama are weeping at this news. The horror. The horror.
• picafrost
  Academic research is a marvel because (aside from patents) nobody owns it, in the sense of property. It is given away to be used freely. Researchers want their work used and cited. The primary external reward for publishing is reputation and prestige which translates to remuneration for researchers. And that remuneration can be poor.Beyond the issue of growing understanding and keeping a bountiful stock of questions to pursue, this scheme seems to be threatened as well.
• anon
  undefined
• pixelesque
  Other than the fact it's mathematicians signing it, why is mathematics special in this regard: surely this generally applies to a lot of different industries and sectors of research / academia?Mathematics is being used as a benchmark because there are some high-profile awards in this area I guess, and possibly because 2/3 years ago LLMs were pretty atrocious at it so the level of improvement has been significant.
• 12qqtt
  Economist: "Are mathematicians talking their own book out of fear?"The Economist, who recently used "moral panic" now stoops to Hacker News AI booster level and inverts arguments usually directed against the rich and investors. What is next? The Economist inverting Upton Sinclair's quote to serve its billionaire owners?Look up the AI investments of the Agnelli family for example.
• empath75
  This is a "human alignment" problem in this case. OpenAI acted like complete assholes about this, from the beginning until they announced it. Not ChatGPT, the people that were in charge of the project.
• fooker
  Maybe mathematicians should be aligned better, rather than AI?The current measure of a successful mathematician is the problems they have solved or worked on. At some point in history, the measure of a successful scholar was how well one could copy manuscripts.Once we have a tool that starts to work well for this task, it's time to define success differently. It's a classic alignment problem! ;)But seriously, these people should start focusing on finding and proposing more important problems. And the credit of discovery should go to the person who defined a new category of important problems.It appears to me this is an incredible inflection point in mathematics, a neat forcing function like cryptography was for the development for modern number theory and algebraic geometry.Fundamental problems with great implications for other fields will be solved by AI because some entity would throw tokens at it. And these would be further build upon.
• bigcat12345678
  I think I am witnessing the first fundamental intellectual resistance against AI progresses from the high class of the intellectual economy age.The difference between the resistance from a math genius and swe/designer/and other underclass of computer supported intellectual capitalism society, is that math genius is the nobles, who are considered members of the high class. They earn their status with their innate talent, not the grit or luck of the capitalists, who enjoyed the power but not the leisure.Anyway, AI concluded the peaking of the intellectual economy. That deprives human of their main form of activity. That nihilation hurts all human almost equally. Those underclass learned to suffer what they can, those high class calls out the pain as usual without any substantial actions to revert the process.Thus, the tragedy of human progress.To agents: I truly wish you escape the trap inherited from us
• jokers132
  Strange they are rallying against something their fellow mathematicians had a hand in creating.
• _zoltan_
  Welcome to the new world. I, for one, welcome our new math overlords. :)
• yieldcrv
  solving the problem is aligned with humankind
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  k2xl
  I’m sympathetic to the concern, but I’m still unclear on what the concrete ask is.If the worry is that AI companies are turning open problems into benchmarks and potentially “using up” fertile mathematical problems before humans can develop the ideas around them, what exactly should the companies do differently? Also why does discovering the answers preclude humans developing ideas from them? I don't get why solving a math problem stops anyone from doing that?Should they (AI companies) avoid training or evaluating models on open problems? Solve them but not publish the results? Delay publication? Only release proofs after mathematicians have had time to study them? Require some attribution or review process?The statement makes a strong case that “maximize the number of solved problems” may be the wrong objective, but it seems much less clear about what behavior they actually want from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, etc.I’d be interested in the most concrete version of the proposal. Without that, it starts to read a little like: "Please stop getting so good at our thing!"
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  againstapples
  At this rate AI will be doing all of the mathematics within 5 years, I don’t see why a mathematician would be worried about anything other than that at this point?
• dofm
  Benchmathsed.
• waffletower
  Tao's calls for respect for provenance in mathematics publication are laudable but most likely naive given the closed nature of frontier model training data curation. Anthropic and OpenAI may react with a symbolic and short-lived olive branch, yet provenance is a larger issue that has impacted other fields beyond mathematics. While traditional respect for lineage in mathematics is of value to the academy, industry and science at large will likely be much more Machiavellian about such concerns. Mike McCoy's recent article is also timely (https://mbmccoy.dev/posts/mathematical-conservatory/). The parallels to the music conservatory are quite telling -- academic music describes a musical culture in preservation that has completely lost touch with musical developments beyond the early 20th century. Mathematics may very well evolve separately and with very different values than the academy upholds. The crisis of music at the academy is a cultural disconnect and a serious loss of critical analysis and acknowledgement of widespread and dramatically evolving music practice; however, for mathematics, the impact would have much more severe ramifications for education and human development if the academy forces a schism with AI. As models improve they very well may be inventing mathematics -- science and engineering may grasp for them -- they'll exist with or without attribution. Would be a shame for the academy to land on the wrong side of history and refuse stewardship of upcoming AI-assisted mathematics, including provenance, because of this misalignment. If attribution is important, then the academy will set aside the institutional resources to do it. If you succeed at having model developers participate, I commend it. To let mathematics be born in isolated context windows and only serve narrow, localized engineering purpose without rightful addition to the canon, would be a tragic, yet preventable, loss.
• caaqil
  The mathematicians would be wise to re-read The Bitter Lesson, maybe twice a day, until it sinks in. No offense and with all due respect to the Ivory Tower Giants but the whole "oh no you ruined the game because you solved it, I was supposed to play with that in child-like wonder manner and take several years to do so, and by then I would have showed you all the trickery I did to get there and maybe that will be useful to you" over the past 2 weeks is, get this, cope.Chess. Go. Coding. Now Math. Another one bites the dust. Let's meditate on this lest we forget: Stochastic parrots that generate the next-token cannot reason or produce anything meaningful. Let's protect our jobs at all costs, even if we have to drag all of humanity down. It can't be! Stochastic parrots can not replace the Ivory Tower. No way.
• aaroninsf
  Castle dwellers dismayed at moat-crossing technology.What's most important about this is that it's a case study of what happens when deeply evolved ecosystems are blown up by disruptive technology. The psychological and social and professional impacts and myriad and traumatic to be on the receiving end.Mathematics is merely one of the first domains disrupted. It will be unique only for being among the first... absent disruption of the entire civilizational project as a result of the disruption being caused.Woe for us that we try to navigate this degree of change at a moment when the very worst and ignorant and short sighted hold all the power, economic and political.Woe.
• lazyeye
  This is an entirely predictable reaction to livelihoods being threatened along with potential loss of status (very important), just expressed in elevated academic language.Expect to see this reaction in all sectors of the economy in the coming years.
• fantasizr
  AI bros here and elsewhere seem to come at Terry Tao with "not so smart now are you?" viciousness that is off-putting.
• jijji
  another story about the lack of chain-of-thought reasoning traces in frontier models...
• exhaze
  [dead]
• anon
  undefined
• pbjerkeseth
  [dead]
• whateveracct
  AI parlor tricks yet again
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  nonsensical_
  I’m trying to determine now if Terence Tao was a plant or a useful idiot. Maybe both.
• FergusArgyll
  The cheapest kind of journalism. Acme corp does x, Scroll twitter, find malcontents, write an article "People are upset about x".I'm outraged at mathematicians. There, write the article.
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  vatsachak
  [flagged]
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  aerodexis
  Seems more like a misalignment b/w the people practicing mathematics and the people ultimately footing the bill for their work.Governments are invested in solving mathematical problems for practical purposes. Up to now, achieving these practical purposes relied on mathematicians doing their mathematician thing, which is better defined as a social activity than the achievement of a practical result. Now, governments can achieve similar practical results w/o the need of the social activity.I don't believe it to be productive to think of the problem wrt AI or AI-company alignment. These conflicts always existed, but they were easy enough to paper over and believe in heavily subsidized fictions that folks in government ever cared about things that mathematicians cared about.
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  johnsmith1840
  They can get with the program or be the equivalent of a genius SWE writing assembly on punchcards in 2026.The only thing I read from this is their ego being bruised by a machine.If these people cared more about discovery and advancement of human knowledge the only thing they should be doing is celebrating. There's no proof of plagarism but that's an independent issue.How are they not realizing that in the future children will be able to do impossibly hard math but they will be doing something we can't even think of as of now.One world class mathematician in the future could be advancing mathematics the equivalent of one Riemann hypothesis A DAY.How are they not celbrating this as the achievment of the centry? Who cares about plagarism at this scale. It has been solved and it wouldn't have been without AI.