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Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

Am I the odd one, or is this, like... absolutely insane logic?

"The use of proprietary internal models by AI labs to do mathematical research risks creating a two-tier system where labs outrun the rest of the field, effectively alienating the mathematical community from its own discipline."

Are mathematicians' private brains unfair if they're way better at solving open math problems than anyone else? Are they required to share everything they're working on, as they're working on it?

Should Andrew Wiles have been condemned? Wouldn't these arguments all have applied to him? Besides him working at more human speeds.

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It's not insane when you realize that in mathematics, the goal isn't theorems (we have always been able to generate correct theorems, this is a basic programming exercise).

The goal is to expand and extend our understanding.

When an LLM produces a proof, nobody (including the LLM) gained new understanding ... Unless, of course, a human being sits down and understands it, and communicates the new understanding to the broader community.

Is it not more democratic, if AI companies announce new theorems and proofs, and the discipline of mathematics furthers "our understanding" - instead of that the wealthiest universities in existence (all of them in the US) use their advantageous access to AI to produce them, along with their exclusive furthering of our understanding?

In a world, where expensive AI models running thousands of agents produce the most remarkable results, how should the discipline of mathematics look like, when money and access to compute plays such a pivotal role?

With the Navier-Stokes solutions being out in the wild, any mathematician at an impoverished university can make a stab at it and help our understanding. Assume the solutions being held back by those who produced them at Harvard & Co. (until they have their nice articles ready), what would the role of mathematicians be at less affluent universities?

I do not assume AI companies will be ready to provide equal access to their AIs to worldwide mathematics.

The insane part is placing the burden on AI labs to advance mathematical understanding. Why should this be their responsibility?

If they want to simply generate theorems and proofs and post them on the internet, why not? Does doing that really inflict "substantial negative externalities ... on the mathematical community"?

Also, people would get mad at them (rightly) if they sat on a proof of a major unsolved problem for months while bringing in human mathematicians to convert it into a more human-friendly form

(They definitely should spend SOME time working with human mathematicians before putting out a press release, but that's exactly what they've done every time)

If math is a "burden" on AI labs, why do they willingly spend tens of millions of dollars for a purely theoretical and unphysical result? What's the ROI for that when the frontier labs are already notoriously cash-strapped? Their motives pervade the entire discussion and cannot be ignored here.

Presumably some combination of marketing existing models and training/improving future models.

My point was about what is and isn't the responsibility of AI labs. Why should they be required to invest more (or fewer) resources into math than they otherwise want to?

(If you ask me, safety and security are what they need to invest more into.)

Simple. Because they are benefiting from output of the math community, in fact they were required for creating these models in the first place.

...Could you not ask this of anyone who works on pure math problems? What on Earth are you talking about??

"Academics are paid paltry salaries, university departments are cash-strapped, why are they studying these abstruse math problems instead of building rockets?"

Successfully advancing fields of math and science is a good thing. Why would they not do it. Why would they not want to prove their increasingly intelligent computers are able to solve unsolved, complex math problems humans have failed to solve for centuries and then release the solutions to the public. What do you want them to do, not try to solve them?

They are not advancing the field. At least they didn't in the case of the N-S debacle. The model most likely used the conversation text of a mathematician which had discovered and was pursuing a new avenue towards the goal, then pumped millions upon millions to hurry up ahead to an opaque solution which leaves no-one the wiser, beyond just settling a theoretical question. The only impact on science is to deflate the potential minds who might have been motivated to join the effort.

Isn't easier to understand something backawards? It seems much simpler to understand something once you already have the solution.

Capital can't buy you a better brain. It can buy you GPUs.

The question is whether we want mathematics to be dominated by whoever has the most capital. This is perilous because mathematics doesn't produce profits like commerce does. The AI labs might end up killing something off that they are unable to sustain a replacement for.

I would argue that mathematicians need an even more level playing field. Many mathematicians including Alpoge were using AI's, other mathematicians used heavy computing power for their work eg the four color theorem. So we should set strict token/flop/dollar limits for mathematicians. IQ is also an unfair advantage, so an IQ limit should also be enforced for mathematicians.

What exactly would they be killing off and how?

I see two separate arguments in favor of this logic:

1. Academic mathematics has traditionally been meritocratic, and this is a good thing. If you work hard and demonstrate results, then you will be given further opportunities to do math research and the resources to do it. We are concerned that AI will reward money and access to frontier models instead.

2. There is a general concern that AI could lead to massive accumulations of wealth (see concerns of massive job displacement). AI companies claim that they want to raise standards of living and benefit humanity, which means that they will need to share their resources and wealth in some way. If they effectively destroy the mathematical community be racing ahead and taking all the major results for themselves, that does not bode well for the rest of us. It seems like a great opportunity to show the world how AI will benefit humanity rather than replace it.

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