robotpepi

agree. so many people missing the point. I don't think they even bothered to read the letter.

> I am saying that for a fixed target, like proving the Rieman hypothesis from scratch, the required hardware will shrink.

Yes, but to what point the hardware will shrink? There are several orders of magnitude of difference in what in your mind AI will become and what more conservative people believe. You take your view as granted...

so you're 100% sure that AI will solve every intellectual problem in the future, since as long as that's not the case, it's us who need to ask the questions. I don't know man, I wouldn't bet on that. What if we end up being wrong and then there is not research community?

to be honest it is difficult to discuss with someone who doesn't even try to understand the basics of basic science (and how it compares with _applied_ sicence), yet talks with so much confidence. even the solution to navier stokes won't have an immediate practical effect...

> But I also think that he is a bit shell shocked, much like other luminaries in the past have been when confronted with rapid technological development

You're locked into that idea, but provide no real argument. The dangers they describe in the letter are real.

The problem with your opinions is that you tend to state certain very quesitonable ideas with 100% confidence. Right now, we don't know if AI will be able to solve bigger problems, or if they'll be so efficients that you no longer need a whole datacenter for running them. We don't even know how much of creative work they are able to do. We cannot make decisions that could destroy decades of progress just because of hype.

We can't be sure AI will be able to ask the questions of the future. At least right now, AI is not capable of that.

I still don't see the analogy, can you care to develop?

> Keep in mind employees at AI companies are publicly stating that they believe they're risking a >10% chance of human extinction.

Are we really going to take what they say in public seriously?

> Let's assume in the next decade GPT-7 PRO Ultra is cheaply ubiquitous, inspectable, reproducible, transferable, reasonably un-constrained by any institutional interests.

I'd argue that this extremely extreme scenario is the only one in which it kind of makes sense to not have understanding. But let's be honest: no one knows if we'll be there (and it seems unlikely since everything reaches a plateau eventually). So, what happens if we allow ourselves to forget everything and then we don't reach the ideal scenario?

I don't see any meaningful analogy with your cites of Baudelaire. First of all, Baudelaire discusses art, which is very different to science. Several new forms of art have emerged, and then slowly integrated, despite the strong opinions of some. Here, Tao's letter discusses mainly practical aspect of scientific research. It is not about what a "failed mathematician" would do, or if "LLM can only record what already existed"; in fact, it ackowledges that LLM could become a central tool. If you want me to be even more precise, what they're saying (without saying it out loud) is that tech companies have too much power and are being irrespondible with it because they don't even think about the externalities.

It makes no sense to compare mathematics with chess. Chess is a sport. No one is interested in watching two machines compete. Chess doesn't have a practical impact. Etc. What you seem to suggest is that AI will be able to completely (or at least in a great part) replace mathematicians. It could be the case in the future, but no one knows right now, and more importantly: tech companies don't even think about it! they don't think on the externalities.

> But complaining about the dawn of a new era of advancements seems counterproductive.

you completely misunderstood the critics. your analogy is awful. this is much closer to the industrial revolution in the uk: it brought a lot of progress, but also extreme inequality and concentration of power.

I really hate this overly condescending takes. First of all, what do you know about the internals of math research that allows you to speak with so much confidence. Second, you're not even addressing the issues raised by the letter! This is not about "oh they made a bunch of problems easier". There are huge economical interest behind: who owns and has access to models? are these companies interested in developing research or they just grind PR stunts without worrying about externalities in how research is actually conducted? Etc etc.

> It's not obvious to me that's an unethical thing to do, if it happened as they described.

What!? Even if everything OpenAI said is accurate (big hypothesis there!), it's highly unethical to rush a solution because others have jsut had success. And that's the only beginning.

> if this were true, it should be stated more clearly

stated more clearly by who? people in social media? I don't know what your feed shows you, but if you focus on what the visible people in the math community is (and have been) saying is precisely what I said.

> but right now there's no credible evidence, only claims.

since it's openAI who has the evidence (in the form of chain of thoughts, their internal processes, etc etc), it's on them to justify why they're innocent. but they've released nothing at all. we don't even know how hard they tried.

you're being naive

> We are scared of AI being smarter than us, the "human helped the AI" narrative is more psychologically comforting.

We're scared of big tech companies concentrating ridiculous amounts of power, destroying the communities that support and guide scientific research, without even thinking about the dangers and possible consequences, because a PR stunt is more important in the short term.

> They don't even claim to have had a proof, only to have been working on it.

Yeah, the guys who solved it for Euler and in the hypoviscous case, with the same technique that worked for full Navier--Stokes. They were "just" working on it.

It's in OpenAI's first announcement that they had solved the problem.

> Solving a major maths problem that has resisted the best mathematicians for so long seems to prove otherwise (even if it were just a matter of remixing old ideas, which is not the case here).

I don't think we know enough about how they work to claim that. OpenAI said they had 10 THOUSANDS agents working on the problem, testing all ideas they found in the literature (including, it seems, the breakthrough of the guys who had it for the hypo viscose case).

I was referring mostly to

> This proof is just checking the boxes for mathematicians

There are already quite a lot of summaries of the story that lead to the solution, and the impact that the intermediate results have had.

I was referring to the "it's just mathematicians checking boxes" claim

fair enough

you're as sure of what you say as wrong about it.

> Because very few people actually have access to these logs, all access is monitored and recorded, and improper access will get you fired. It's not worth risking your job over something like this.

That's beyond naive. The money this would mean for OpenAI (and the money they've already spent)...

> just more user friendly language

you try to justify it in a logical way, but you fail to realize that this is inherently subjective

> 2) 'taking responsibility' is not 'vacuous corporate speak' - that's a terribly cynical view. It's literally the case - the leader takes respnosbility because they failed to set the conditions for the good outcome.

Tbh it seems like you're autistic and simply don't understand how such a "o take responsibility" message really looks like and what effect it'd have.

that's something a human needs to do, and it's non trivial, but it's a simple task compared to checking the correctness of the proof. in any case, most of the language is probably already defined in Lean and checked independently by many people.

you're missing the point...