A misalignment of AI in mathematics

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.

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?

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.

solving the problem is aligned with humankind

Benchmathsed.

The cheapest kind of journalism. Acme corp does x, Scroll twitter, find malcontents, write an article "People are upset about x".

I'm outraged at mathematicians. There, write the article.

The mathematicians would be wise to re-read The Bitter Lesson, maybe twice a day, until it sinks in. No offense and with all due respect to the Ivory Tower Giants but the whole "oh no you ruined the game because you solved it, I was supposed to play with that in child-like wonder manner and take several years to do so, and by then I would have showed you all the trickery I did to get there and maybe that will be useful to you" over the past 2 weeks is, get this, cope.

Chess. Go. Coding. Now Math. Another one bites the dust. Let's meditate on this lest we forget: Stochastic parrots that generate the next-token cannot reason or produce anything meaningful. Let's protect our jobs at all costs, even if we have to drag all of humanity down. It can't be! Stochastic parrots can not replace the Ivory Tower. No way.

This is an entirely predictable reaction to livelihoods being threatened along with potential loss of status (very important), just expressed in elevated academic language.

Expect to see this reaction in all sectors of the economy in the coming years.

Tao's calls for respect for provenance in mathematics publication are laudable but most likely naive given the closed nature of frontier model training data curation. Anthropic and OpenAI may react with a symbolic and short-lived olive branch, yet provenance is a larger issue that has impacted other fields beyond mathematics. While traditional respect for lineage in mathematics is of value to the academy, industry and science at large will likely be much more Machiavellian about such concerns. Mike McCoy's recent article is also timely (https://mbmccoy.dev/posts/mathematical-conservatory/). The parallels to the music conservatory are quite telling -- academic music describes a musical culture in preservation that has completely lost touch with musical developments beyond the early 20th century. Mathematics may very well evolve separately and with very different values than the academy upholds. The crisis of music at the academy is a cultural disconnect and a serious loss of critical analysis and acknowledgement of widespread and dramatically evolving music practice; however, for mathematics, the impact would have much more severe ramifications for education and human development if the academy forces a schism with AI. As models improve they very well may be inventing mathematics -- science and engineering may grasp for them -- they'll exist with or without attribution. Would be a shame for the academy to land on the wrong side of history and refuse stewardship of upcoming AI-assisted mathematics, including provenance, because of this misalignment. If attribution is important, then the academy will set aside the institutional resources to do it. If you succeed at having model developers participate, I commend it. To let mathematics be born in isolated context windows and only serve narrow, localized engineering purpose without rightful addition to the canon, would be a tragic, yet preventable, loss.

Castle dwellers dismayed at moat-crossing technology.

What's most important about this is that it's a case study of what happens when deeply evolved ecosystems are blown up by disruptive technology. The psychological and social and professional impacts and myriad and traumatic to be on the receiving end.

Mathematics is merely one of the first domains disrupted. It will be unique only for being among the first... absent disruption of the entire civilizational project as a result of the disruption being caused.

Woe for us that we try to navigate this degree of change at a moment when the very worst and ignorant and short sighted hold all the power, economic and political.

Woe.

another story about the lack of chain-of-thought reasoning traces in frontier models...

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AI parlor tricks yet again

AI bros here and elsewhere seem to come at Terry Tao with "not so smart now are you?" viciousness that is off-putting.

I’m trying to determine now if Terence Tao was a plant or a useful idiot. Maybe both.

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Seems more like a misalignment b/w the people practicing mathematics and the people ultimately footing the bill for their work.

Governments are invested in solving mathematical problems for practical purposes. Up to now, achieving these practical purposes relied on mathematicians doing their mathematician thing, which is better defined as a social activity than the achievement of a practical result. Now, governments can achieve similar practical results w/o the need of the social activity.

I don't believe it to be productive to think of the problem wrt AI or AI-company alignment. These conflicts always existed, but they were easy enough to paper over and believe in heavily subsidized fictions that folks in government ever cared about things that mathematicians cared about.

They can get with the program or be the equivalent of a genius SWE writing assembly on punchcards in 2026.

The only thing I read from this is their ego being bruised by a machine.

If these people cared more about discovery and advancement of human knowledge the only thing they should be doing is celebrating. There's no proof of plagarism but that's an independent issue.

How are they not realizing that in the future children will be able to do impossibly hard math but they will be doing something we can't even think of as of now.

One world class mathematician in the future could be advancing mathematics the equivalent of one Riemann hypothesis A DAY.

How are they not celbrating this as the achievment of the centry? Who cares about plagarism at this scale. It has been solved and it wouldn't have been without AI.