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Comment by znjssjnsns | Hacker News Reader

It is so incredibly liberating to see the intellectual elite struggling with was already reality for 99% of the rest of us: your understanding is not required, it might in fact be detrimental as it amounts to a handbrake on progress.

Understanding never was the goal, results were. We will be getting boatloads of those. What does your understanding get us? You get a fancy house out of it and you might be intellectually stimulated by it, sure, but I hope you can see how that does not constitute a valid need for the rest of society to labor just to support your class and its lifestyle.

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> your understanding is not required

Whoa, how quickly have we forgotten how the AI is trained?

> You get a fancy house […] society to labor just to support your class and its lifestyle.

Wait, how much money do you think math teachers make? Do you know how much money AI engineers make in comparison? Why the animus and insecurity toward education? You are making math teachers sound far more rich and powerful than they actually are.

> Understanding never was the goal

Hard disagree

what are even "results" in mathematics if not understanding? for instance, what's the utility of the counterexamples built by openAI?

It seems you're fighting an hallucinated enemy.

One would think something like the study of the square root of negative 1 would have little utility beyond a hand-wavy appeal to understanding, but it turns out to have major practical applications ranging from electrical engineering to 3d rotations.

I tend to believe we're still likely at a very primitive level of technology. It's difficult to imagine this primarily because of unknown unknowns. For instance at the end of the 19th century it was believed that science had basically been finished, and all that remained was working things out to ever higher levels of precision to wrap up a few curiosities.

Then along come relativity, quantum mechanics, and more - all completely revolutionizing science, and upending centuries of false beliefs. I think we're far more likely to be at the end of the 19th century again, rather than at the end of science, or anywhere near such. And if that's the case, then it may well be that seemingly academic discoveries of today, perhaps ultimately achieved by an LLM, are what help unlock the next great revolution.

Yes, but what will truly advance science is new discoveries that require curiosity and creative thinking, and LLMs are not the technology for this.

As impressive as these mathematical results are, all they represent is known mathematical techniques being combined in ways that humans had not explored. The AI is not inventing areas of math, or even creating it's own conjectures. There will be more of these to follow, but eventually the pace will slow as the space of what can be done with known mathematics is explored.

What is needed for creativity, for new scientific discovery, is more than an auto-regressive LLM assembling someone else's Lego blocks in novel ways - it will require an AI not just built to predict but one that is also built to expand the frontier of what it knows. Prediction failure that results in curiosity and exploration, not hallucination.

We'll get there eventually.

Your reply isn't a response to the comment, but rather a general expression of antipathy towards mathematicians, who are apparently fatcats who have fancy lifestyles.

OpenAI sat on the results so they could drop 10 at a time. It's rumored that they are sitting more results: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/513818/a-serious-challeng...

So not only are we not going to get boatloads of results, we're only get as many results as necessary for OpenAI to market their models.

I shouldn't be surprised how prevalent this viewpoint is, given the entrenched anti-intellectualism these days in the US and across the world, but it's disturbing to see it so widespread on HN of all places.

You are of course free to wield this new technology any way you choose (to the extent its owners and your wallet allow you to, for now at least), and if you can enrich yourself by doing so power to you. I won't attempt to dissuade you from your apparent hatred of those who have spent their lives trying to expand the boundaries of human understanding. I'll just state my equally emotion-driven opposing view: It always was and always will be about the understanding. "Results" and "progress" without sufficient thought are the reason our enormous modern wealth is accompanied by so much human misery.

I don't relish the prospect of living in your predicted world of multiplying technology untempered by human thought, if that's what happens to emerge. I don't think it will be a good place for anyone but a handful of the very richest. Good luck adding yourself to their number.

Once you have experienced first hand the level of disdain the so called intellectuels have towards the regular joe it is hard to feel any sympathy for them. If I can be replaced with cheap foreign labour you too should just deal with it. You are not entitled to your well paying oil drilling job, you know, you should just move on and take another job or two and some nightly backbreaking gigs here and there if math doesn't feed your family any more. Surely you don't want to be lazier than immigrants and can adjust to their frugal standards of living...

Exceptional mathematicians are not going to be jobless, just like master level craftsmen still do kinda well. Tough luck if your abilities are subpar to achieve excellence though, that is just the rat race to the bottom we have created and finally the so called intellectuels are also getting to fully taste it themselves. Realizing you were never that special and your job can be either fully automated away or reduced to a wage that barely pays the bills is a hard pill to swallow. But progress is inevitable as they have been saying.

I will keep studying math purely for fun.

I struggle to identify with the apparent glee you feel at berating the person you imagine yourself talking to. I guess we all have our own idiosyncratic forms of fantasy, but this one doesn't seem very healthy.

I think you are generalizing tad bit too much. There is certainly some subset of intellectuals that is detached from normal people and are riding the high of their academic position. At the same time, in my experience, you will find a lot of compassionate and understanding academics, certainly way more of them than in business.

And there was quite a bit of work put in to make people less compassionate, for example by feeding them the dubious musings of Ayn Rand.

Don’t bother, they don’t see it. It’s sickening.

That same scientific community that gave us such wonders as thermonuclear bombs and agent orange? Please. I understand we need science, but we don’t need “intellectualism” and the various self-appointed guardians of whatever that is.

Same thing on coding - business doesn’t care one bit about your clean architecture or clever design, so long as the AI can change the implementation fast enough to ship whatever product comes up with.

People are having a rough time figuring out that good design and fundamentals no longer align with the business side of things.

> business doesn’t care one bit about your clean architecture or clever design

Perhaps not in general, but this is nothing new or related to AI. For one thing software is a strangely private craft - your boss is likely only aware of what you are producing, not the craft or quality (or not) that went into it - the only ones aware of that would be co-workers who are looking at your source code, and perhaps choosing to use it or not. Secondly, the sad truth in business, not just for software developers, is that there is a huge amount of truth in "it's not what you know, it's who you know".

> People are having a rough time figuring out that good design and fundamentals no longer align with the business side of things.

The business may be unaware of what your code looks like, or the expertise that went into it to avoid bad outcomes (immediate or future), but they surely DO care when poor quality software leads to production outages, and customer complaints, and their boss yelling at them as a result. The results of poor quality software will manifest in many ways, not just the poor reliability and performance of your latest release, but also the future outcomes of attempts to build on top of it.

I think it's extremely early to assess the impact of AI software quality and the ways it impacts businesses in these ways, such as production outages, that they do care about. There have certainly been well publicized cases such as AWS outages blamed on AI, but although it seems like an eternity it's only been ~6 months since AI really became usefully competent and capable of "vibe coding", so I think we're only just beginning to see the consequences.

Companies and bosses that have enthusiastically adopted AI are unlikely to point to AI and themselves if/when it proves to be detrimental (AWS were quick to deny it, despite the insider leaks to the contrary), so I'd not be surprised if it takes years rather than months for there to be much clarity on this.

FWIW, I think there is a considerable difference between math, which is what we're really discussing here, and software development, regarding how quickly it will or has fallen to AI. Math is really uniquely suited to LLMs and reinforcement learning of domain-specific reasoning since mathematical papers basically consist of nothing but reasoning (training data!), and it is an entirely theoretical field that essentially lives in the world of language (incl. mathematical notation) without any external grounding. Contrast to software development where what is available to train on is mostly the end result (code) rather than the reasoning that got you there, and there is also a large "experimental" aspect - what happens in the real world when you run the produced artifact.

> People are having a rough time figuring out that good design and fundamentals no longer align with the business side of things.

That's not true and wasn't true in the sense that businesses don't care directly but they are indirectly. Are you saying business doesn't care if things go down or it doesn't work?

At the end of the day people don't care until they do and then they blame you.

> Understanding never was the goal, results were.

Understanding is the goal, both at an individual level and at a societal level. If no one can understand it, no one can teach it and it can't be used to progress.

If you can’t pull it, you can’t move it and thus no useful work could be performed.

Mechanical devices changed that calculus. The same will happen to “intellectual” work. Your understanding is slowing us all down.

Even beyond the malady of feeling liberated by others struggling, all you’ve done is express poisonous anti-intellectualism.

Anti-intellectualism is not worse than being against the actual working class (those stupid rednecks who don't even know what is best for them).

That’s pure straw man. There isn’t anyone against the working class in this thread, and there is anti-intellectualism in this thread. I don’t doubt there are some academics who are jerks, but you’re incorrectly assuming something about all academics (not to mention all working class) that simply isn’t true.

The intelligentsia and their various gatekeeping mechanisms are not guardians of “intellectualism”. They are representatives of a class that is seeing its end coming.

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