That's why I prefer my Wisephone 2. You can still use slack, whatsapp, teams, banking apps, spotify, google maps, etc. But there is no browser, email, youtube, tiktok, etc., either.
Wouldn't the more relevant point of comparison be the difference between long-term government bonds. The exorbitant privilege is that it's easier to fund US government debt because trade in USD means that large institutions around the world need USD and store those dollars in the form of US treasuries, which in turn lead to lower bond rates and cheaper debt.
What we care about at the end of the day is bottom line economic growth, specifically GDP per capita growth. Whether government debt is more or less expensive is a collateral matter. It just means you need to make different choices in taxation versus borrowing—as long as the end result is the same how does it matter?
Cost of capital is a direct input to growth (from both investment and consumption). The more expensive it is to borrow, the lower future growth is, and the cost to borrow is increasing. This means taxation must go up if you want higher potential future growth through reduced cost of capital.
Bond yields go up (ie government debt)->consumer debt costs and cost of capital for business investment goes up (all consumer debt is priced off of "risk free" gov debt)->consumption slows->growth is reduced
> Cost of capital is a direct input to growth (from both investment and consumption). The more expensive it is to borrow, the lower future growth is, and the cost to borrow is increasing
Right, which gets back to my point that US GDP per capita growth has been incredibly stable from 1830 to present, both before it had an empire and cheap borrowing and since it’s had an empire and cheap borrowing.
I think the letter is misguided. So what if the AI labs are misaligned to math?
- But they announced a result before a paper was peer reviewed! The horror! So what? The mathematics community can read the paper once it is written up.
- But their results they publish may not care about conceptual understanding and insight! So what? If that's the mathematics community's goal, then they should sift through the lean proof and reformat the ideas to make them more insightful and develop their own conceptual understanding.
- But they aren't bothering to do literature review to tell the history about how humans contributed to the final result! So what? If it's so important to the mathematical community, they can do that themselves and throw a party every Tuesday in the honor of Luis Martínez-Zoroa and wear jeans on casual Friday in honor of Buckmaster and Alpöge - the left leg for Buckmaster and the right for Alpöge.
An AI giving a definite result of an open problem doesn't decrease the mathematical community's insight or conceptual understanding. They are still free to continue doing their work and pursuing their goals. If it's really so bad, they can just pretend they don't know NS is solved and keep spending their efforts trying to prove it never blows up (or a hand full of them can try to blow it up from scratch).
Guess what! I spend no part of my life working on unsolved math problems. I read some books for pleasure. I work in a hospitable with sick kids. I help my wife raise our kids. My goals are misaligned with the mathematics community! I've done nothing to increase conceptual understanding and insight! So what?
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.
The opposite of malicious is not honest. Nor do I see how motivations fall on a binary. The user submitting an AI proof can be honest, or malicious, or careless, or overzealous, or incompetent, or a whole bunch of other things. As far as the AI's motivations, "malicious" is just as much an anthropomorphism as "honest" and both descriptions are absurd. Nor do I really understand how any proof, regardless of its origin can be called honest. I think their definition of a "malicious" proof makes sense, but I don't see at all why an AI generated proof necessarily meets that definition.
What I'm not seeing reported on much is if the result reveals any new techniques or ideas that advance mathematics - which is what we usually hear is the reason to work on these problems. Or does the resolution of NS just add a fact to the list without any new understanding.
My understanding is that it’s proof by counterexample, so the main thing to study would be the implications of the counterexample. The technique used to find it sounds like a lot of brute force. But I’m not a mathematician, and maybe the AI used some clever techniques to narrow in on it.
Boo hoo. OpenAI got the result only days ago. It makes perfect sense for them to take the win in marketing, and it's fine if they take a few months putting together the paper and present it more productively later. The scientific community didn't get the result themselves, so it isn't theirs to be bossing everyone else around about.
I don't care much for AI myself, or smart phones either, for that matter. I would be content if NS remained a mystery for another 100 years - or forever. But goodness, does the "scientific community" need to take a deep breath and count down from 10.
Was it a marketing win though? My takeaway is: if you're doing groundbreaking work with openAI's models and they find out, at best they'll outspend you and scoop you. At worst they'll steal your chat history.
That's a completely different matter. And does it matter to my point if they were successful or not? That's ex-post analysis. It seems clear that ex-ante, they wanted this to be a marketing win. The original poster complained that they wanted a marketing win.
My point is: why shouldn't they want a marketing win from this. What obligation does a non-academic institution have to follow the traditions of academia? Its result doesn't belong to academia. And if academia wants to subject OpenAI to their own internal processes and give them marching orders, it just isn't going to work and maybe - who knows - it'll even further erode their own legitimacy. Does anyone actually believe that NS would have been resolved in the 2020's if we lived in a parallel world where LLM's were never invented? Would Buckmaster have gotten as far as he did without LLM's doing a lot of the work for him? We can complain about AI companies contributing to mathematics, but are we complaining about Terence Tao using AI in his research? When Tao publishes something are we all going to go to war against him because maybe other mathematicians' prompts went into training the AI that Tao used?
In the hypothetical, when he becomes famous, someone making prints for $20 is $1,980 less than what he would be getting now so the damage is $1,980 per print.
Both the purchasers of the print and the photographer are part of society. Under your proposal, some purchasers will spends $20 on a print that they would of have been willing to spend more than $2000 for, so the purchaser gained at least $1980 of excess value while the photographer gains $20. In your view, how is a purchaser of art gaining $1980 of value helping society?
The cost of buying the encyclopedia becomes disposable income to be used on other consumer goods. In that sense in shows up in lots of other companies profit-and-loss statements.
but
2^(sqrt(n)^2) = 2^n