alt Hacker NewsTao’s key point is that the way people are using AI today does disrupt that. Because people and companies are valuing the results over understanding. So we’re getting slop results rushed out that are automatically verified.
Moreover in the past, discussion and idea sharing would happen naturally to overcome the friction of the process. But now when OpenAI is stuck on a particular part of NS for example, they can just throw more capital & tokens at the problem.
I won’t speak for Tao. But it is not “people” who have valued the result over understanding. “People” are a bit impressed that the machines are as good or better than the priests who have been praying at the inscrutable altar of pure mathematics. But it is mathematicians—I am speaking as a mathematician—who have adopted a culture of valuing results over exposition and transparency. The field has been rife with extremely opaque papers for many years and the character of research participation has been one of exclusion and competition over proof priority at the expense of understanding and transparency. It is unbelievably ironic to listen to mathematicians complain about “AI slop” when they have built careers upon human “slop” if slop means papers crammed with technical density that prevents all but specialists from reading the work.