Comment by rramadass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rramadass | Hacker News Reader

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The point viz. understanding intrinsic/extrinsic motivations and how they shape one's behaviour (i.e. SDT) is a nuanced one and so i wanted you to get an overview of it and then see for yourself how applicable it is to the OpenAI/Mathematicians Navier-Stokes issue.

Also see my other comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49695418

I suggest you go through the SDT wikipedia entry and note in particular how intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are internalised and integrated into a coherent sense of self. This is true for all humans and worth a study to understand what motivates us to do what we do.

To repeat myself from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49680925 "the AI companies behaviour, threatens everybody's Autonomy, nullifies their Mastery/Competence and robs them of Purpose/Relatedness/Belongingness. Nobody should accept this."

Mathematicians will keep doing research with or without AI. But so far they have been doing it in a free environment where there were unsaid-rules/ethics/morals being followed; the most central of which is "do not steal my work; if you use my work give me credit and compensation (if you make money off of it)". This takes care of both one's intrinsic and extrinsic motivation needs which is why all of our scientific practices, societal/economic rules etc. are setup on a system of incentives appropriate to their domain eg. for a researcher doing something original and winning the Nobel Prize/Fields Medal is far more important than making money while for a Business CEO making money is everything.

In the case of Navier-Stokes problem, Name and Fame were everything and Money was a lesser goal. OpenAI with their despicable behaviour have robbed the mathematicians off the above by going behind their backs, without giving them credit and simply throwing a huge amount of resources at the problem. This should not be tolerated.

I think that's just oblivious to what mathematicians actually care about when it comes to "name and fame." Basically no one outside of the mathematics community and its periphery knows who someone like Terrence Tao is, and those outside academia who do know who he is probably don't know one single result that he's proved. The most famous mathematician in America may be James Stewart for authoring the calculus textbook. Mathematicians do not get fame amongst the general public. They want fame within mathematics.

If the mathematical community identifies Luis Martínez-Zoroa or Buckmaster and Alpöge as the last human in the chain before NS was solved, and internally attaches their names to it, that will be enough for most mathematicians. Mathematicians write the textbooks. Some other mathematician is still free to consolidate OpenAI's proof into a better proof, put it in a popular graduate textbook, and gives it the name "The Martínez-Zoroa Theorem", and then whenever an undergraduate PDE textbook mentions NS, they say, "according to The Martínez-Zoroa Theorem...", and then Martínez-Zoroa gets a Fields Medal for his contributions to his theorem.

The case you're making seems to be that no one in the mathematics community would feel satisfied with that because at the end of the day everyone would know Martínez-Zoroa didn't solve NS. OpenAI did. And it wouldn't matter if Open AI paid to erect a 50 foot statue of Martínez-Zoroa in front of a museum of the history of NS in which every single mathematician who ever contributed anything to NS was publicized and celebrated and glorified and deified and credited and thanked. It wouldn't matter because maybe what mathematicians actually wanted wasn't credit for what they did do but that at the end of the museum tour the final display would talk about the human who solved NS. No matter how much credit you give mathematicians, no mathematician will now ever be able to claim "I solved NS" because OpenAI beat them to it.

If that's the case, then the letter is misguided. It's pretending that the problem is that AI is misaligned with the goals of mathematics. That's not the problem. The problem is that no matter how ethically it behaves, humans are going to be pissed that there is a non-human thing that is better at math than them. And I'm also pissed that we are creating this thing that's going to be better than humans at a whole bunch of things and it's going to cause a bunch of people to outsource their humanity to an AI. I'm pissed about that. But I'm not trying to pretend that AI can somehow eventually win me over if only it was more aligned with me when I know full well that its alignment has nothing to do with my loathing of it.

This is just making up stuff, setting up strawmen and knocking them down by oneself which is meaningless. There is nothing much to infer from the above verbiage other than "living in you own fantasy".

My other comment is relevant here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49710169

To repeat myself for the umpteenth time, the real issue is;

AI companies are stealing our hard-won lifelong research findings, which we were already sharing freely, without attribution/credit and building upon them without informed consent nor compensation.

The AI companies behaviour is the problem, not the technology itself.

Ironically, by engaging in these sort of shenanigans, OpenAI is effectively killing the "Goose that laid the Golden Eggs". viz. Researchers were giving away their hard-earned highly specialized knowledge freely to the models in the hope that it will help them get quicker to the result. But now everybody is going to lockdown their research findings and will stop sharing it with the models to the overall detriment of advancement of Science.

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