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pred_today at 6:57 PM2 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

tossandthrowtoday at 8:27 PM

> 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

I think this is an aspect of academic math that a lot of people whish to see crash and burn - the attention and accreditation economy.

> it's probably easy to miss if you have never engaged with research in maths

I don't think anybody are missing anything, in particular not here.

The argument is not far from the senio developer who knows the ins and outs of a code base. Now AI comes along and they complain that they will loose grip of the code base.

At first that is correct. Secondly you accept that the grip might not be that important after all. At least not for a commercial project where you are a cog in a machine.

The question is whether it is different for mathematics.

That's the open question.

yunwaltoday at 8:48 PM

I think most people here get that this is the point?

The point beyond this one is that an AI proof doesn’t prevent humans from working on the problem, it destroys the current economic incentive to work on the problem. Perhaps we should rethink the current incentives. In order to make money as a chess player, you don’t need to beat AI, or ban AI from playing chess.

If mathematics took a similar approach (we don’t get paid for solving net-new problems, we get paid for enriching human understanding), then there’s no issue.