Hacker News Reader

Comment by TripolitianFish | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think you hate to be snide even a little bit, if I’m honest. The difference being that the entirety of mathematics research has never pulled in the CapEx that anthropic or OAI is. Mathematicians in academia are mostly paid to teach, mind you.

I’m personally pretty excited by the results coming from these labs, but trying to dismiss the capital allocation objection with “but what about” is really silly.

View on HN

You can't just look at the funding for math departments. I think the value generation potential of every mathematician in the world could exceed that of the capex of these companies. How much is "lost" when a brilliant mind goes into pure math research instead of nuclear engineering, or civil engineering etc. Cumulatively, a lot.

Edit: I'm fine saying we're spending too much money on AI, in fact I agree, but "theorems" are not the only output of these companies. It's almost definitely not going to be worth the expenditure, but the benefits are not going to be only lean proofs

> I think the value generation potential of every mathematician in the world could exceed that of the capex of these companies. How much is "lost" when a brilliant mind goes into pure math research instead of nuclear engineering, or civil engineering etc. Cumulatively, a lot.

This is already the situation that we have: because of the fierce competition for temporary academic positions, and very little hope for permanent positions, large quantities of really good mathematicians leave academia and work in a job that has basically nothing with mathematics (many mathematicians consider these jobs as bullshit jobs, but they pay the bill).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com