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Comment by atleastoptimal | Hacker News Reader

Most scientific breakthroughs are simply a continuation of previous work.

I feel that these suspicions of mathematicians "seeding" the models' with intuition on how to solve these problems massively overestimates how much their prompts helped the models, and underestimated how much work the models did.

Why? We are scared of AI being smarter than us, the "human helped the AI" narrative is more psychologically comforting. This line of reasoning will recur a lot over the next few months; we don't want to admit we are no longer the smartest species.

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> We are scared of AI being smarter than us, the "human helped the AI" narrative is more psychologically comforting.

We're scared of big tech companies concentrating ridiculous amounts of power, destroying the communities that support and guide scientific research, without even thinking about the dangers and possible consequences, because a PR stunt is more important in the short term.

If this were true, it should be stated more clearly, than most of the criticism which seems to aim to minimize the capabilities of these models.

Way more often I see

>AI is a scam and steals human insight and doesn't produce anything original

>AI is too capable/powerful and will concentrate power even more than it does already due to its capabilities

The latter is rarer because it requires admitting that AI is useful and inventive

> if this were true, it should be stated more clearly

stated more clearly by who? people in social media? I don't know what your feed shows you, but if you focus on what the visible people in the math community is (and have been) saying is precisely what I said.

Of previous, not concurrent work. Science is friendly competition, and spying on others is unfriendly.

Please stop with this psychoanalyis and mind reading with AI and human fear. It’s a thought terminating cliche at this point.

In this case, it’s much simpler and more human. Largely between two humans — buckmaster and Bubeck. The interesting question is what the role of contribution and credit for research in the ai world.

The capabilities of AI aren’t even in question in this case.

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