alt Hacker NewsA misalignment of AI in mathematics
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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.
For some reason, every time I see something like that, I get major Ted Kaczynski vibes.
On the contrary to what Tao believe, it seems like we need AI to move the needle on mathematics.
> problems in many fields of mathematics
Developing 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.
"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?
>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.
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.
What changes exactly is this post asking for?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
Everybody is okay with coders losing out to AI, but when it starts hitting their field then there is outrage. I love it.
This is a Stephen Wolfram tier problem. I hope to read what he has to say on the matter in the near future.
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.
I'm unsure how any sufficiently advanced AI would not lead to cognitive handoff/the described problems.
The thing is no one is stopping anyone from getting the same knowledge/understanding/insight
If 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
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.
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 built upon.
I wonder if we will see a mass (math) exodus of mathematicians to open weight models.
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.
Math, like art, it is more about the process and not the end result.
The irony is that LLMs are, at their core, very much just applied math...
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.
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.
Terrence, youre a mathematician; now extend this to the general case: AI is misaligned (inherently) with humanity.
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.
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
Both Amodei and sama are weeping at this news. The horror. The horror.
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.
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.
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.
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
Strange they are rallying against something their fellow mathematicians had a hand in creating.
Welcome to the new world. I, for one, welcome our new math overlords. :)
solving the problem is aligned with humankind
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!"
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.
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?
Benchmathsed.
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.