Top mathematicians are outraged by OpenAI's methods | Hacker News Reader

Top mathematicians are outraged by OpenAI's methods

economist.com

96 pointssbulaev20 comments

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662371.

Ego is insulted, they're raging but it changes nothing. Math is beautiful exactly because it discerns right from wrong with 100% accuracy, while all the emotions and "flexible interpretations" are redirected to /dev/null.

The problem isn’t the proofs, it’s proper attribution.

Not sure whose ego is being insulted here. If you spend two seconds reading the letter you’d realize it’s talking about human understanding has been crucial to advancing of mathematics, and AI companies are not bothering with it. If they succeed, human understanding becomes irrelevant. The beauty of math that you claim comes from the process of humans understanding it. Maybe you should try to redirect your emotions and misdirected feelings of schadenfraude to /dev/null and try to read what it is about

> Despite its length, the paper contains little of the explanation that mathematicians typically provide when sharing a new discovery.

Classic

https://archive.ph/baq6d

thought this link is better / cleaner: https://unwall.app/www.economist.com/science-and-technology/...

From the outside it seems like these mathematicians are saying “you shouldn’t use ai to solve our most difficult problems because they have no practical value”.

Seems ok by me, let’s point all the gpu clusters at things that actually matter and let the math folks math.

Quite appalling to open a "journalistic" report by ridiculising the people you report on:

> Not since Socrates complained that the written word might make people lazy about remembering things has there been such an outpouring of angst against a new technology in the world of academia.

It's also sort of a misleading gloss of what is going on in that dialogue, which, it is important to note _is in a book_ -- one of many that Plato wrote. Plato has Socrates recount a story (supposedly) from ancient Egypt in which an Egyptian god claims that books will make people forgetful. He never makes that claim himself, as a character, and certainly Plato didn't believe it, because he wrote lots of books before and after that dialogue. The general thrust of that section of the dialogue is that writing can be a useful tool for remembering, but _not_ sufficient for learning, which requires person to person interaction and dialogue.

Watching people who have built their entire identity around being untouchably smart suddenly be confronted with the future that children will be able to solve the equivalent of millenium prize level math in an afternoon for 5$ is enjoyable.

Let's allow robots at the Olympics and laugh at the poor athletes losing! /s

There is nothing wrong with the desire to be smart, actually succeeding at being smart, and then expecting some recognition for that achievement.

I actually love the analogy that mathematicians will be the equivalent of olympic athletes.

Nobody needs to throw a rock far, or run fast, nobody gets any value except entertainment.

I think your own analogy is actually much worse than my point.

Or another way.

I enjoy seeing the fastest human on earth run.

But I'm still getting in my car to go to the shop.

That should not be downvoted..this is true for manu people on this forum too.

But we have the same examples in chess, running, bodybuilding etc..all of which machines have out performed us.

And that good for humans are finding their true natural again, an intelligent consciousness animals. We take pride in that.

What a shallow midwit reductionist take. This is no different than people who claim that artists are only mad because AI has made everyone world class “artists”.

Art is entertainment. It has no functional value.

The simple fact that you're comparing art to mathematics is making my point for me.

Entertainment has no functional value for humans?

Or at least tell me the functional value of Fermat’s last theorem.

Art doesn't move cargo faster, or save me time analyzing a dataset.

You can make the argument that "high" math has no function value which is fair.

But I would not agree.

It'd be naive to suspect that this isn't part of the backlash. Artists and musicians are indulging a will-to-power impulse just like the rest of us. Nobody likes to lose power, or to see their own influence diluted.

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