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Comment by vatsachak | Hacker News Reader

Why is Terry Tao even talking these arguments when all OpenAI did was a sophisticated brute force search with LLMs?

Give them Navier-Stokes in a vacuum

Same reason Gary Kasparov and Lee Sedol started their morning in one universe and ended their evening in another.

Brute Force or not, the game is being played and won without them all of a sudden, and even worse: at a level of output far beyond them

No it's not though. Can OpenAI prove Navier-Stokes from a vacuum with no human knowledge?

Can a human?

(Evidently not, since humans hadn't managed to do it even with the entirety of human knowledge available to them.)

They used an agent swarm. Could humanity? Of course; it was close to being solved. It might have taken five years

The question you asked was whether the AIs could prove the thing "in a vacuum", without making any use of previous human work. "Close to being solved" is a statement about all the previous human work that mathematicians might have used to do it in five years.

Replication of the development of mathematics by human civilization is a task for an artificial hyperintelligence.

What will anyone do? What will anyone feel their purpose would be? Can't all have the same one, either.

What will the planet 'need' homo sapiens for (arguably it never needed homo sapiens at all)?

Would anyone's time or life really have significant value?

I didn't mean that as "we need hyper-intelligence." I mean that going all the way from nothing to singular, dual, plural grammatical numbers attached to particular nouns to abstract one, two, three, many to zero, one, two, three... to rationals to... is a very long way.

What do you think all the PhD's and post-doc students are doing...? It's not called graduate-descent for nothing :p

> What do you think all the PhD's and post-doc students are doing...?

Thinking.

The article wasn’t written by Tao.

He's expressed similar fears of being replaced in a recent talk

Because it’s high time to rethink the incentives and rewards structures to nurture the next generations of mathematicians when corporate money and automated AI systems are mining the pool of limited interesting problems without giving back or enhance our understanding.

The problem they care about is not just “AI replaces human mathematicians” but rather the society thinks mathematicians can be replaced by AI.

Brute-force search is called that specifically for its lack of sophistication. A "sophisticated brute search" is an oxymoron.

You're right. But...

Spending 132 billion tokens is definitely way more energy than human mathematicians would have thrown at the problem and probably would have solved within two years.

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