alt Hacker NewsThe Advisory Group states in its recommendations [1]:
"We want to state clearly from the start: we do not endorse this practice, and we ask them to stop testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary models."
To me, this is a take against progress so that mathematicians can keep their jobs. What would we do if, instead of math, we were talking about diseases? Are we going to keep diseases around so that doctors can keep their jobs too?
Replies
It all hinges on the definition of “progress”. The debate of the past month is all about questioning whether formally proving outstanding unproven theorems without human understanding constitutes progress. This is quite different from solving diseases.
The rest of that document makes a pretty compelling case for why this is a bad practice
I don't think this is a reasonable take at all. Most work on maths has no real benefit other than to further human understanding of maths - it's more like an art. Nothing is gained from OpenAI solving all these problems but taking jobs from mathematicians. Other than advertising for OpenAI at least. It could not be more different from having AI work on disease research etc.
Comical ask
The trope you're drawing a parallel with has a (to me) compelling counter though: there being a cure for every disease wouldn't stop people from getting sick.
Not so for maths.
Advocating purely for progress and not humanitarian value is how we'll all get enslaved.
The latest posts from Terry Tao on Mastodon effectively ask for an AI to explain its results to human mathematicians.
> "I believe that AI can contribute positively in all of these directions [NB: exposition, community building, new directions of study]"
...but we're not talking about diseases. Publishing an AI-generated Navier-Stokes solution does not save lives. (And, in fact, it harms some.)
Why did you leave out the entire quote?
> At present, some frontier AI labs are testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary models that remain inaccessible to the broader scientific community. Our recommendations are formulated with this practical context in mind. However, ideally, they would not do so. We want to state clearly from the start: we do not endorse this practice, and we ask them to stop testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary models.
To me, the issue is that the models are proprietary which are only accessible to a few people in 2 digits. It's not about progress but access.