alt Hacker NewsPlease help me understand this and I'm asking this in good faith.
Why can't OpenAI publish whatever it wants. And the math community can use it or not use it. Fundamentally OpenAI's solutions are high signal - they are incentivised to not deliberately mislead people. Let the individuals in math community choose to read it or understand it? If OpenAI wants to publish something, let them do it in the current channels using peer review using whatever time is required.
What's wrong with this? The math community thinks this will destroy previously unwritten ways of prestige allocation and remove incentives that used to exist. I say that the community can rearrange and allocate prestige and time in different ways to maximally use the technology.
Replies
>community can rearrange
You're describing an improvised surgery on a living organism. Developing a complex system involving humans that is productive and doesn't collapse is extremely hard, so if it ain't broke don't fix it.
The Math community can "not use" a proof? How would that work? It's a little like coloured functions (async etc) - you have 'human proved' vs 'machine proved'?
They can use the new proofs as foundations for future proofs.
But many folks just won't be motivated to attack or help digest solved problems because there's less extrinsic value in doing so. Tao and others argue that it's this human effort that finds human-relatable abstractions which spurn further investigation. Take the humans out of the loop, and they'll stay there, is the argument as I understand it.