I was watching a talk by Terence Tao a couple of days ago, and I noticed a shift in his attitude towards AI. His enthusiasm seemed to have waned; he was becoming more dismissive of it, and I was wondering why.
“A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics,” with a list of important mathematicians.
This post makes it clear that, to put it bluntly, they’re psychologically butt-hurt.
They talk about misalignment, but this revolution is a massive step forward in the advancement of mathematics. Everyone has access; everyone can collaborate.
Yes, “plagiarism and attribution” are current-day problems for them. But guess what? Those were stupid things to concern oneself with anyway if your real goal is to advance mathematics and the spreading of it.
This whole post kind of reads like their egos being butt-hurt.
There are tons of developers who published open-source code that made all of this possible without any attribution. And that is indeed the future we must inevitably head towards, if one’s ego would allow it, that is, and if one is properly “aligned” with the right goals.
I envision us all collectively talking to a centralized and open AI. This would really ignite human sharing and collaboration.
It is indeed problematic that currently it’s in the hands of some companies, while it should be a public good.
I hope this progression will eventually, finally, trigger the real solution to all of our problems: true global cooperation, global politics, and genuine collaboration as a human species.
But I hold my heart, because if even these mathematicians have misaligned egos, then what’s to be expected of the rest of the decision-makers?
I think their point is more on the fact that just proving something is only half the work. Intermediate results and proofs are often also of immense value. Right now the output is sloppy proofs and LEAN code. This is useful, but a large part of the effort still lies ahead. And if you are a mathematician you'd rather be working on hard problems than fixing slop.
The main ideas for solving Navier Stokes have been exposed,
it's not something buried in slop.
And if it were, you could have AI write up the big ideas that actually mattered in these said slop proofs.
I think they're more afraid of the current status quo.
Distilling, writing textbooks, teaching, ...
And currently, I could be wrong but, I see them being blind to the possibilities it brings. AI could very well be distilling maths, spreading it, and nurturing the ecosystem way better than the few elite mathematicians ever could.
> If it was entirely up to fable max or sol max the result would have been pretty bad.
How can you know it will have failed?
I don't think it's that hard, if you clearly define the goal well, and have a bit more compute available, and do some intermediary bookkeeping.
Been running near identical tests for years now. Latest models are the only ones I don't throw away the results/code. Which is impressive, salvagable/usable is a giant step up.
I'm thinking of the Ottomans capturing Constantinople. Very much paraphrasing: Since Ottomans had a massive cannon made with new technology. Since Constantinople hadn't hired the cannon inventor. Since Constantinople was poor. Since it was sacked by other christians in the crusades previously. So it was self afflicted by christians.
One can see the climate crisis like that. Only global accords work, otherwise self-limiting CO2 is mostly sacrificing one's economy while others do better. USA will block all international climate accords. Because the president and half of politicians acts like climate change is not real. Because a whole party thinks that. Because voters think that. Because the media tells them that. Because the media treats fossil company propaganda like science. Because it's so cheap for a handful of companies to corrupt media or politics.
What is the epistemology of the majority of voters... scandals, conspiracy theories, UFO:s. What shows on TV or on your feeds. I assume it's child's play for some non-western actor to cause constant infighting in the west, causing billions in economic losses or destruction of alliances. For whole planetary level issues, who's the opponent, working in the shadows? Maybe, after all, the aliens are already here...
Sometimes I feel the same, and then sometimes I wonder if that "moving away feeling" is the last of the old breed who are hanging onto power, maybe the next step after this massive wave of ultra right wing stupidity is something much brighter ?
The western world has more or less come together to reduce emissions. If you look at US for instance emissions are down in abs terms. Not relative to gdp or per capital but total emissions. This holds even if you adjust for trade.
The “problem” is there will always be independent upcoming nations like china and India that don’t really care to make sacrifices for collective goals. Their people are finally experiencing materially better lives and that comes w energy consumption.
This will ultimately be solved by markets and technology. People 100y ago were concerned about horse crap flooding the streets and what solved that wasn’t some agreement to limit horses but the invention of the automobile. Same will happen here and it’s already beginning to happen
> The western world has more or less come together to reduce emissions. If you look at US for instance emissions are down in abs terms. Not relative to gdp or per capital but total emissions. This holds even if you adjust for trade.
It certainly is reduced per-production. China has double the carbon emission intensity of production that the USA has for example.
I'm not sure China's emissions can be considered a separate thing when the rest of the world relies on them for plenty of manufacturing. The West is still a massive emitter per capita.
Terrence Tao is an exception in many regards. I’m less concerned if it helps him, and more interested in how it affects the average person, since the vast majority of users will be average.
Tao can use LLMs on his own terms, on his conditions. Under those circumstances, it's an absolutely fantastic tool.
In an enterprise, everyone gets to use LLMs. Everyone can create slop. In an enterprise environment, this can lead to weird situations where the senior has to put in extra efforts to contain the slop of others... so I can kind of see where the "hinders seniors" is coming from.
I don’t think it’s even “seniors” containing slop of others.
I think it’s those who still care about quality (which seems to be decreasing in the industry overall) trying to keep the whole thing running, in a sea of people who think going really really fast and not understanding their code is fine because LLMs can make sense of it and clean it up later.
Just look at the condition of open source contributions recently
