From what I see, a lot of people were angry at Anthropic's limits with the subscription plan. OpenAI had some issue I can't remember, and they reset people's token usage (for the session or weekly limits). I think they got a lot of good press, now OpenAI seems to just do it at random when they want a PR boost. It makes scheduling your worklife a bit difficult if you are limited by that.
There are a lot of us who just use the AI on projects until the session limit hits, and wait for the usage to reset.
Well, I was happily paying $300 canadian pesos per month to OpenAI for some time... until the tokens just dried up overnight for some reason.
I went from using it non-stop all day every day for months, to running into my weekly limit within 24 hours almost overnight.
They lied about token efficiencies and everything... said they had no idea what the problem was, etc... and then bam, once China starts releasing more powerful models, they start "resetting" our token limits constantly ... sometimes ... maybe ... if we're lucky ...
I am over it.
I don't care WHAT I pay to be perfectly honest. I would have gladly paid $2,000 per month for the service I was receiving.
1. it is hard to justify 20 years of education at this point,
2. with no such people around, who will guide those (supposedly) supersmart machines?
A. Ronacher (who builds harnesses for a living) complained today that he has no idea what Astra is doing. Imagine a bunch of slop kiddies facing an aging AI-generated codebase. Not to mention the maths.
Debatably the people who were getting 20 years of education will still be just as capable, and the 20 years of education was always a side effect of their capabilities, not the cause of them.
"Proving things without comprehending them is, they argue, a threat to intellectual work in general."
As always, economist shows its colors:
"Mathematicians’ fears resemble those that accompanied the invention of the ball-point in a world of fountain pens, or even the advent of electronic calculators. Intellectuals have often worried about so-called technological determinism . Will a new tool control humans? Will it lead to mental decay? Such fears have typically turned out to be unfounded."
Ball points vs. AI? Billions of dollars invested in AI vs ball point pens?
This article couldn't be any worse. Contradicting with their own beliefs, trying to defend AI while underestimating its capabilities and god knows how many zibillion dollars invested in it.
It seems like a lot of the issue here is that these problems aren’t interesting in and of themselves, but they lead down interesting roads. It defeats the purpose if you solve them without getting any real understanding.
It’s akin to saying you’ve solved “pancake flipping” problems with a waffle maker, or “travelling salesman” problems with a zoom meeting.
Nothing is stopping these folks from continuing to study the problems and arriving at their own solutions so they can continue having whatever insights along the way.
Well, one thing is stopping them. There will be no more adoration for their genius.
If you truly do it for understanding and not the attention, carry on. AI should change nothing about your motivations.
> Nothing is stopping these folks from continuing to study the problems
My understanding is they are? And literally everything in this world is based around incentives. If you say “well you can continue to work on understanding, but your kids are going to starve” that’s not nothing.
A lot of this would be public funding.
If AI is reducing the need for mathematicians in an area it makes sense to fund it less and fund something else that isn't solved.
Your comment perfectly illustrates why most are missing the point. Many people, including you, deeply believe that most mathematicians are chasing adoration of their genius, otherwise why would anyone care about such abstract work?
People like Grigori Perelman would baffle you, a mathematician who solved the Poincaré Conjecture, refused the monetary prize, field medal and continues to live a life of total recluse.
For most mathematicians their primary drive is chasing the unknown, not for anyone’s adoration, but to pursue their desire to see what lies in the beyond.
Any proof for or against a mathematical conjecture, bruteforced by AI can be the spark for new insights. I'll concede that to the AI companies.
But I agree with the sentiment that the marketing behind these "discoveries" is disingenious. They pretend they solved the problem, but it still takes a bunch of humans to reduce the solution to a simplified and sensible explanation.
Looks like mathematicians (like people in many other professions) have to redefine what their work means and how to define success. Hard to agree that a tool that can find a proof is detrimental by itself, rather it voids some assumptions people relied on previously
Yes if you don't think about the matter for more than 6 seconds you would indeed conclude that, and retreat to the comfortable cliché of "it's just a tool". Meanwhile, I'm glad that there are still people who _think_ about issues and ponder the consequences and reflect on things before they become a reality.
Everyones outraged all the time. It doesn't mean anything anymore. It's that meme from years ago about the red ants and the black ants living in a box peacefully until someone shakes the box and they start trying to kill each other. They go after each other and not the one shaking the box.
You're looking too closely. Whether or not mathematicians are actually outraged makes little difference to how this article plays. Hell, lying would likely INCREASE revenue.
Yeah, I'm so tired of people moaning about how huge swaths of Earth's ecosystem are being destroyed and rendered uninhabitable to humans, how secret police are murdering Americans in the streets, how the president is a child rapist who openly accepts bribes, how unfettered capitalism is destroying tens of millions of lives, how the United States is rapidly falling into facism, how civil rights are being systematically destroyed, consumer and environmental protections are being gutted, and entire generations are being intentionally cut out of the possibility of economic prosperity. YAWN! Give it a rest!
Man, the people who want to just get away with open corruption sure love you.
Hyperpolitics is one term for this. There was an article in NYT about the concept. Attention economy for political info causing burnout possibly same phenomenon as Gen Alpha surrealism and viral adoption, but no institutionalization to preserve the lessons.
Quite appalling to open a "journalistic" report by ridiculising the people you report on:
> Not since Socrates complained that the written word might make people lazy about remembering things has there been such an outpouring of angst against a new technology in the world of academia.
It's also sort of a misleading gloss of what is going on in that dialogue, which, it is important to note _is in a book_ -- one of many that Plato wrote. Plato has Socrates recount a story (supposedly) from ancient Egypt in which an Egyptian god claims that books will make people forgetful. He never makes that claim himself, as a character, and certainly Plato didn't believe it, because he wrote lots of books before and after that dialogue. The general thrust of that section of the dialogue is that writing can be a useful tool for remembering, but _not_ sufficient for learning, which requires person to person interaction and dialogue.
Ego is insulted, they're raging but it changes nothing. Math is beautiful exactly because it discerns right from wrong with 100% accuracy, while all the emotions and "flexible interpretations" are redirected to /dev/null.
Not sure whose ego is being insulted here. If you spend two seconds reading the letter you’d realize it’s talking about human understanding has been crucial to advancing of mathematics, and AI companies are not bothering with it. If they succeed, human understanding becomes irrelevant. The beauty of math that you claim comes from the process of humans understanding it.
Maybe you should try to redirect your emotions and misdirected feelings of schadenfraude to /dev/null and try to read what it is about
From the outside it seems like these mathematicians are saying “you shouldn’t use ai to solve our most difficult problems because they have no practical value”.
Seems ok by me, let’s point all the gpu clusters at things that actually matter and let the math folks math.
Watching people who have built their entire identity around being untouchably smart suddenly be confronted with the future that children will be able to solve the equivalent of millenium prize level math in an afternoon for 5$ is enjoyable.
What a shallow midwit reductionist take. This is no different than people who claim that artists are only mad because AI has made everyone world class “artists”.
It'd be naive to suspect that this isn't part of the backlash. Artists and musicians are indulging a will-to-power impulse just like the rest of us. Nobody likes to lose power, or to see their own influence diluted.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 2.9 ms ] threadI don't care how good Astra or any subsequent models they may release might be... I am never going back to those token reset shenanigans.
There are a lot of us who just use the AI on projects until the session limit hits, and wait for the usage to reset.
Do you mean that you can't continue on your own until the reset?
I went from using it non-stop all day every day for months, to running into my weekly limit within 24 hours almost overnight.
They lied about token efficiencies and everything... said they had no idea what the problem was, etc... and then bam, once China starts releasing more powerful models, they start "resetting" our token limits constantly ... sometimes ... maybe ... if we're lucky ...
I am over it.
I don't care WHAT I pay to be perfectly honest. I would have gladly paid $2,000 per month for the service I was receiving.
I just don't like being jerked around like that.
Toodles, OpenAI.
1. it is hard to justify 20 years of education at this point,
2. with no such people around, who will guide those (supposedly) supersmart machines?
A. Ronacher (who builds harnesses for a living) complained today that he has no idea what Astra is doing. Imagine a bunch of slop kiddies facing an aging AI-generated codebase. Not to mention the maths.
Intellectual side:
"Proving things without comprehending them is, they argue, a threat to intellectual work in general."
As always, economist shows its colors:
"Mathematicians’ fears resemble those that accompanied the invention of the ball-point in a world of fountain pens, or even the advent of electronic calculators. Intellectuals have often worried about so-called technological determinism . Will a new tool control humans? Will it lead to mental decay? Such fears have typically turned out to be unfounded."
Ball points vs. AI? Billions of dollars invested in AI vs ball point pens?
This article couldn't be any worse. Contradicting with their own beliefs, trying to defend AI while underestimating its capabilities and god knows how many zibillion dollars invested in it.
> OpenAI appears to have gazumped Tristan Buckmaster (pictured) and Levent Alpöge, a duo of mathematicians labouring on the task.
What's hilarious is that the economist has gobbled up Levent's disingenuous "this was just a personal project" narrative.
https://mathandai.org
It seems like a lot of the issue here is that these problems aren’t interesting in and of themselves, but they lead down interesting roads. It defeats the purpose if you solve them without getting any real understanding.
It’s akin to saying you’ve solved “pancake flipping” problems with a waffle maker, or “travelling salesman” problems with a zoom meeting.
Well, one thing is stopping them. There will be no more adoration for their genius.
If you truly do it for understanding and not the attention, carry on. AI should change nothing about your motivations.
My understanding is they are? And literally everything in this world is based around incentives. If you say “well you can continue to work on understanding, but your kids are going to starve” that’s not nothing.
People like Grigori Perelman would baffle you, a mathematician who solved the Poincaré Conjecture, refused the monetary prize, field medal and continues to live a life of total recluse.
For most mathematicians their primary drive is chasing the unknown, not for anyone’s adoration, but to pursue their desire to see what lies in the beyond.
But I agree with the sentiment that the marketing behind these "discoveries" is disingenious. They pretend they solved the problem, but it still takes a bunch of humans to reduce the solution to a simplified and sensible explanation.
OpenAI/Anthropic are shaking the box.
Everything is sensationalized, every super niche happenstance is sold as earth-shattering drama, the outrage arms race is so tiresome.
Man, the people who want to just get away with open corruption sure love you.
"Everybody's enraged, why don't you like this unethical thing being done to you by a company?"
What's going on here?
> Not since Socrates complained that the written word might make people lazy about remembering things has there been such an outpouring of angst against a new technology in the world of academia.
I'm outraged at mathematicians. There, write the article.
Classic
Seems ok by me, let’s point all the gpu clusters at things that actually matter and let the math folks math.
There is nothing wrong with the desire to be smart, actually succeeding at being smart, and then expecting some recognition for that achievement.
Nobody needs to throw a rock far, or run fast, nobody gets any value except entertainment.
I think your own analogy is actually much worse than my point.
I enjoy seeing the fastest human on earth run.
But I'm still getting in my car to go to the shop.
But we have the same examples in chess, running, bodybuilding etc..all of which machines have out performed us.
And that good for humans are finding their true natural again, an intelligent consciousness animals. We take pride in that.
The simple fact that you're comparing art to mathematics is making my point for me.
Or at least tell me the functional value of Fermat’s last theorem.
You can make the argument that "high" math has no function value which is fair.
But I would not agree.