alt Hacker NewsI have listened quite a few interviews with Tao and I see him being very careful about criticizing AI. He very often emphasizes the usefulness of it. Where he is critical has a lot of merit. One of the points I clearly remember him saying that having AI be able to solve many of the open problems, regardless of how important there are (there are many open problems that are not that important) greatly reduces the problem space for mathematics students to give new problems to work on.
In a parallel thread omnicognate correctly pointed out that for AI companies it's a direct commercial loss to pour all this money into bruteforcing the solutions to these problems, and that a lot of times the solutions by themselves are not directly commercially valuable. They are doing it for stock price, trying to lure in private capital in preparation for IPOs.
Their models are good, but they are not the moat because Chinese models are good too, so what they are doing, in my opinion, is more harm than good. Mathematics is a science by humans for humans.
>I have listened quite a few interviews with Tao and I see him being very careful about criticizing AI. He very often emphasizes the usefulness of it.
This is tiresome. People should be able to flat-out criticize AI without the implied need to justify themselves all the time or "be careful". Its almost like AI has a trillion-dollar agenda backing it, to the point that you have to add a careful "its really great! But there's this little issue..." for any criticism.
Even those who are very pro AI should have the intellectual honesty of admitting that there are very valid reasons to criticize AI.