alt Hacker NewsThe first assumption [1. AI really did solve a problem in mathematics] is wrong because to really solve a mathematical problem, providing a mere answer (even if formally certified) is not sufficient.
This subjective attitude turns mathematics into nothing more than number-poetry.
That would reduce mathematics to something very pathetic.
Focus instead on attribution. Yes, OpenAI took the last tiny step in the process of solving this problem (= proving it). But it cannot attribute credit to all the mathematicians whose chat logs from the past few months were fed into its training data. Unlike a human, it can't even remember where it learned things from! For many theorems, I can still recall which exposition was the one that "sank in" for me (often not the first one!) a decade after grad school.
In my mind, this makes current LLMs unfit to deserve any credit at all -- they cannot give credit to others, so they and their owners deserve no credit themselves. OpenAI's LLM took the last tiny step, but not any of the important ones.
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Focus instead on attribution. Yes, OpenAI took the last tiny step in the process of solving this problem (= proving it). But it cannot attribute credit to all the mathematicians whose chat logs from the past few months were fed into its training data. Unlike a human, it can't even remember where it learned things from! In my mind, this makes it unfit to deserve any credit at all -- it cannot give credit to others, so it deserves no credit itself. It took the last tiny step, but certainly not any of the important ones.
Yes I fear a lot of doom and gloom around AI is unearned and only really serves to prop up the valuation of AI companies. It's still very much unclear how much work OpenAI actually did versus just copying the nearly complete homework of someone 5 minutes earlier.
I don't think that's particularly true. The whole point of the Millennium Prize problems as the article states was not on absolute difficulty of the problems but on the high chance of a proof producing fruitful results leading to new concepts and theories. Any pursuit of capital T truth will of course aim for better and more clarifying abstractions and is not a subjective turn by any means.
> This subjective attitude turns mathematics into nothing more than number-poetry.
I don't think you understood the point. The point applies to all of basic science. You of course want some explanation supporting the raw answer, so you can use that insight in other contexts.
Grigori Perelman rejected the Fields Medal and the Clay prize among other things for what he considered unjust decisions and lack of ethics and proper attribution to other mathematicians. I find it surprising that he hasn't been mentioned yet, given it involves another Clay prize (ironically another lack of attribution, I guess). There is a long tradition of mental problems among great mathematicians, but maybe this was not the case, or maybe in a Lovecraftian way the observation of deep truths has a terrible toll.
Conversely, I think mathematics should retain this aspect of “number-poetry”. Consider a mathematical pursuit that lacks number-poetry but retains other features such as attribution, calculation, and puzzle-solving: I think of competitions like the largest prime number or the furthest digit of pi. Do these not feel in some sense trivial, more suited to IFLS Facebook posts than arxiv preprints?