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- boersethIt's a little funny how quickly the conversation goes from "AI will never be able to {my-field}" before turning into "We cannot have AI ruining {my-field} with its obviously superior abilities"If OpenAI had never made a push to get good at maths, we might still have a sizeable group of peopne stuck at that first line. I say that because I still hear in discussions the naive rebuttal "But we'll still need _someone_ to {one-step-up-in-hierarchy}" . Although you have to be curious now how long that sentiment can last.The good news for those doing abstract maths might be that, now that OpenAI have proven that their AI can do the job in principle, there's probably not much left in it for them to keep going. Mathematicians should know better than anyone the lack of a direct profit motive in doing the work that they do.(Edited for clarity)
- ralph84Everyone who built an identity on being the most intelligent in the room is going to have to come to grips with that no longer being a differentiator.
- throwyawayyyyHas OpenAI shared any new interesting _problems_? I.e. do more than strip-mine mathematics, as said in the article, but said: "Here is a question I cannot answer, it's interesting for this and that reason, I believe it's true for this and that reason, it's beyond me though, have at it." Has that happened yet?
- bananaflagI find it weird to blame OpenAI for using math as a benchmark. If they hadn't done so, then in three months, say, after releasing Bel, someone else would have used math as a benchmark for it (like mathematicians already do since Fable 5 and 5.6 Sol). The result would have been the same (hundreds of open problems solved quickly).
- drivebyhootingOne aspect that currently frustrates me is that even paying for the highest plans and spending multiple quotas across all flagship models, I still haven’t been able to reproduce any of the amazing feats Anthropic and OpenAI gush about.I suspect their internal harness, models, and thinking budget far outstrip anything us peasants have access to (never mind the compute). So saying that they achieve all these headline results with 3 hours of GPT Pro is disingenuous. If that were so, hundreds of math phd students would’ve already recognized it.I’m coming to the realization that my monthly subscription is only helping subsidize their real internal AGI, and my interactions are a small amount of human feedback and creativity which they can strip mine should they choose to.
- bagacrap
- 0x20cowboy“They took’er jobs!”Funny when it’s someone else eh?Just learn a new trade Terry.(I am kidding if it wasn't obvious)
- magus-stooprthe live video interview on numberphile comes without the New York Times' narrative filter
- mrheosuper>The lab agreed to sponsor a workshop at the institute for what Dr. Tao said was $60,000 to $70,000That's a lot less than i expected. The value he gave back to them should be at least 2 magnitudes higher.
- anonundefined
- arjie> Much as one cannot unhear a movie spoiler or a crossword clue, one cannot explore a problem as profitably and richly once one is aware of an existing solutionCertainly, it’s like being made aware of cheat codes to video games: One doesn’t enjoy the game as much after but surely knowing something is true means you can find many other things that come from the pathway to it now that you know it’s true. Lots of science and tech is like this where someone shows something is doable and then people find better ways to do it but until that person showed it was doable there was no progress.> I am horrified by the many person-years” of research, particularly by young mathematicians, “being casually disrupted or destroyed,” he wrote.That’s what technology does. And he might be upset but we’re the ones paying for it and frankly, I’m happier to have more questions answered than for fewer answered but in an artisanal fashion.Most notable is the fact that the released facts are like “treated waste”. But if the question was worth answering and the value is only in a good answer and not simply a correct answer, then the value has simply not been realized.But that feels strange then that the value is in the good answer, not just a right answer and yet one finds oneself unable to go get the good answer because a correct answer exists.The fact that any answers are made public at all is useful to us all. That’s free knowledge. Would it have been better if OpenAI had discovered this very achievable fact and not said anything? Surely the papers, post discovery would have spoken of the “hoarding” of such “essential human knowledge”.Overall, I find the thing unconvincing wholly.
- pupppetAnyone without a big C in their job title will be on war footing soon enough.
- markfsharpSame as code, the llm can generate vast amounts and it seems to work, but no one understands the documentation Claude Code, or other LLMs, produce. Essentially, garbage because, to make use of it you need to be able to understand it, usually at a cost (unquantified), and if only LLMs do then what is the point?
- ViktorRayI find it interesting that, several years ago when discussing AI, folks used to focus on how automation would first come for blue collar work. Things like driving being automated and truck drivers replaced. And then eventually on the horizon we would see things like this.But we still have no self driving cars. Seems like the automation came by in the opposite direction. Perhaps driving will actually be the final thing automated.
- pyluaI know he says he’s ant talk a human about the proof, but why can’t he talk to ChatGPT?Is the cost prohibitive , or a proprietary model?
- m3kw9I do believe after the initial shock mathematicians will be able to use their math knowledge to solve practical problems, instead of lets solve this conjecture, prove this age old math riddle, how the pattern is possible. They may have some uses in fringe areas, but it doesn't seem all that useful. These guys are obvious quite brilliant, so when they combine it with other fields which they can branch to due to LLM's, they can still stay relevant. Ask your software engineer how that went.
- YizahiIs Terence Tao just another AI booster nowadays, by the sheer amount of PR generating posts? Reading HN one might think that there is only a single mathematician in the world left.Case in point: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- fookerI find this entirely self serving.Terrence Tao was very supportive of AI and formalizing math with lean when it looked like it was giving ‘generalists’ like him an edge over mathematicians too deep into one particular niche field.But now that it’s letting everyone, including mathematicians who are perhaps too specialized, explore ideas and patterns from related math fields, he’s suddenly ‘on a war footing’.
- sakexFor me it just shows that modern math is not that important and mostly ego driven. If it was important, mathematicians would cherish the progress. I can't imagine bio researchers get mad that AI cured cancer.
- typedef_structTLDR: "I didn't understand this proof and there is no one to explain it to me"
- zer00eyz> They “used math for what they needed, which was to evaluate their models,”OAI first paper on the prize was a pretty shitty thing to do. But the rest of this looks like they are just mining the corpus and taking a brute force approach to do it.Im going to say this again, the "pure math" academic types need to get a grip. Plenty of your peers got PHD's and happily made a fortune in finance, while screwing the world (See 2008 housing bubble) and none of you said a peep about that.
- dannykwellsI wish Terry the best.