Yeah, I do not get the dismissiveness given that the researchers themselves were not as dismissive.
> The connection was a “little bit far-fetched,” she says. “But I could imagine a first-year Ph.D. student coming up with exactly those same questions and ideas.”
This one in particular made it seem like a very ordinary interaction.
All these analogies are kind of tortured as they ignore the elephant in the room. The students want to be there to get their job getting paper. They aren’t there to learn.
If society offered some reward for lifting the weight while not enforcing how, forklifts would absolutely be used to lift weights.
The job-getting paper ceases to be meaningful if it no longer verifies competence. If it merely verifies the ability to prompt an LLM then nobody will pay a premium for people have it, and then nobody will pay to obtain one.
And what is the mechanism by which society could stop such AI damage and push for punishment as per law, not per subjective usefulness? Voting every 4 years to a president that never fulfills his promises?
No, society does not want corporations with no responsibilities.
Does publishing it matter? You would almost have to keep it out of the cloud to avoid it being ingested as policies change. So even sharing it may become higher friction.
The challenge here is that the business world doesn't really recognize the concept of cheating.
In particular, tech is very open to people cheating and if billions of dollars could be had by somehow communicating the chess engine's work to a human at chess, the world of business would cheat at it.
Tech has a number of large startups that basically started with the assumption of "what if we assumed the law had no teeth?"
This whole discussion is basically a field demanding that their field be preserved for them alone to discover. No competition allowed besides the monks of mathematics.
Shouldn't the AI companies know by now that all mathematical knowledge belongs to the mathematical community? Hopefully this letter knocks some sense into them.
You can invent whatever fantasy you like. I hope more honest people will read the letter (from the fields medalists and other endorsers) and consider it on its merits.
Here's the thing. I read the letter. I'm considering it on its merits. And it has very little. They made great arguments for why it's a good thing that the mathematical community operates the way they do. They could have made a good argument for why practitioners within the mathematical community shouldn't be seduced by the power of AI and should continue to build mathematics they way they do now. Ignoring AI as a tool, but perhaps not ignoring the results coming out of it, builds understanding and skill and develops humans. I'd be all for a letter that calls on humanity to not give up their humanity to AI tools. To not become lazy and overly dependent on them.
The letter makes no arguments why AI companies proving a bunch of results quickly at all affects the ability of mathematicians to do what they want to do. It's just a giant self-congratulatory list of all the wonderful things the mathematical community does and notes that AI companies aren't doing the same thing.
It's not enough for them that they are still free to pursue all the goals they outline in that letter to their hearts content. They want to make sure everyone else doing mathematics also sets aside their own goals and pursue theirs. I distrust AI as a technology regardless of alignment. And I've learned to just not use them and focus on the things in my life that matter to me. It turns out that I'm still free to pursue the things in my life that are meaningful regardless of the existence of LLMs.
Spot on. They now feel threatened that there's multiple challengers to their intellectual monopoly. This is their "whaaahhh... whaaahhhh... private company bad, now," but where OK when Halliburton, Boeing, General Dynamics, Monsanto, Open Society Foundation, Tides Foundation and many other shitty and scummy private and so-called "non-profit" entities were funding their shit. Now their entire business model is changing. Is not that it'll completely collapse, it's just changing and they are throwing a bitchy fit.
A lot of this was self inflicted by Florida. Between their roofing coverage laws and their attorney fee laws, suing for new roofs was basically free, so everyone and their dog did it.
“Free” if you won, meaning the insurer should have covered but refused and forced the insured to litigate, and part of the remedy was reimbursement of reasonable attorney fees. So, in other words, insurer at fault. That fostered a lively market of attorneys willing to take cases on contingency.
Of course, all that is in the past with the GOP legislature’s big changes to the statutes and DeSantis’s appointment of pro-insurer judges throughout the state.
Now, when Hurricane Paco does tear your roof off; soaks and destroys all your homelab Hoppers; and your insurer denies what should be a no-brainer claim because … well, just because it can, you often have to come out of pocket to pay a lawyer for the lengthy litigation — at precisely the time that you are probably even more cash-strapped than usual.
“Nub City” is a nickname for Vernon, Florida where the residents ended up filing far more dismemberment insurance claims for amputated limbs than was statistically likely, the town of 500-800 people was the source of 2/3rds of the claims against the policies at one point. Insurance companies stopped writing dismemberment insurance policies in the area.
> Vernon gained infamy in the late 1950s and early 1960s due to the improbably high percentage of residents who made insurance claims for lost limbs, leading to an investigation of whether residents of the city were intentionally dismembering themselves for the insurance money. These insurance claims from Vernon, with a population of 500 to 800, accounted for as many as 2/3 of claims nationally, but there was no way of proving that any particular amputation was deliberate.[9] This led to Vernon being referred to as "nub city" during this period. In 1980, Errol Morris attempted to make a documentary about this phenomenon, but after being threatened by city residents and physically attacked by one, he changed the focus of the film, resulting in the 1981 documentary film Vernon, Florida.
A lot of streaming platform listen minutes has always been this type of filler music. Until now, you could not really disambiguate intentional listening and filler listening. Now you can and the filler listeners wont even notice[1]. A huge chunk of the listen minutes whose value flowed to the artists (from a market perspective, technically this is inefficient), is now not going to go to them. Spotify will prompt optimise based on listening stats and perfect it. TBH until now, many artists were doing stream minutes optimisation of their pop music as well, this is kind of the logical conclusion of that. Human artists will have to stick to intentionally listened music, which is going to be a difficult competitive market. And most listeners actually don't care about this type of music to the same extent, measured in streaming minutes, so the market will be smaller as well. Popularity will end up mattering quite a bit more than it does today I suppose.
Example: This one is easily a replacement for people who listen to linkin park type music passively: https://elevenmusic.io/tracks/6aa1ca95740e34b282c33b0a Well except the vocal only pre-drop part, that was horrendous lyrical flow from the clanker.
> The connection was a “little bit far-fetched,” she says. “But I could imagine a first-year Ph.D. student coming up with exactly those same questions and ideas.”
This one in particular made it seem like a very ordinary interaction.