It's a nice rant that I think will become more common until everyone burns out and one important realization dawns upon them: the corporations doing these things don't really care about your plight, suffering, etc. You can write thousands of books using this kind of tongue-in-cheek-but-really-angry language, and they'll just laugh it off. Felix Reisenberg will make a new post about something he's doing with Claude, Boris will make a tweet and everyone will rush to turn it into LLM-generated images so they can post on their LinkedIn for their bosses to measure their engagement KPIs, and we'll forget about the rants.
>And now that AI has solved all our problems, we can devote ourselves to more important work: going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.
Grim but this is exactly where society is heading.
There are no shortage of artistic pursuits, subcultures, pick-up leagues, and more that you're free to engage with. Get off the beaten path and you'll find humans enjoying life in a wide variety of ways that are uncorrupted by AI.
Are you by any chance born to rich parents in a western country?
Because most people in the world are working around the clock to supply food and shelter for their family. It's a bit unclear still how you are going to consolidate the two facts
I've been looking for a baseball or softball league for my kid. He doesn't want to play school ball, doesn't play travel ball, but loves the game. It's impossible to find baseball or softball leagues after the age of 12 that are not attached to a school or travel. Volleyball is about the only thing that exists.
> you'll find humans enjoying life in a wide variety of ways that are uncorrupted by AI
Some of those people were mathematicians, engineers, physicists who found joy in being skilled at what they do and were able to be financially rewarded for their effort applying their skill. Are these artistic pursuits, subcultures, pick-up leagues, etc going to pay their mortgage? Will they help them get a job in a field they are trained in?
The "free to pursue more important things" is a hand-wavy statement that doesn't talk at all about what those people should be doing to provide for themselves after wages plummet. The hyperbole is drawing attention to the ridiculousness, not making a comment about there not being a rec soccer league or something.
> Some of those people were mathematicians, engineers, physicists who found joy in being skilled at what they do and were able to be financially rewarded for their effort applying their skill. Are these artistic pursuits, subcultures, pick-up leagues, etc going to pay their mortgage? Will they help them get a job in a field they are trained in?
IMHO, we should be structuring society to provide maximum opportunity and remuneration for creative, engaging professions. Instead we have capitalism.
> The "free to pursue more important things" is a hand-wavy statement that doesn't talk at all about what those people should be doing to provide for themselves after wages plummet. The hyperbole is drawing attention to the ridiculousness, not making a comment about there not being a rec soccer league or something.
Exactly, "free to pursue more important things" is a pleasant-sounding way to say "It's not my problem, fuck off an die for all I care."
Let's hope they have some land so they can farm potatoes in between their lives of artistic pursuits and other joys. Because those are not going fill the fridge.
"beaten path" is often used as if it as something lesser, but if you think about it, it's just people making something they all often do, going from a specific place to another specific place, easier for themselves and everybody else by using roughly the shortest route, rather than dancing their name or random thoughts on their mind every time. It's a good thing.
Now the "beaten paths" (our public spaces) are getting spammed, polluted and destroyed, turn into jungles to the point that actually just walking off into the jungle can be easier for some. But that is lame, even for the very few people who can do it (many people can't right now, future generations won't be able to at all if we let this slide), why not drive the parasitic assholes ruining our public spaces off into the jungle instead?
I find puzzling such comments that present things as if they were possible in a capitalist society. People still need to buy food, clothes, pay rent. Are those off-the-beaten-path, uncorrupted pursuits going to provide for that? We would need a major societal change, the undoing of centuries of economic structure, and we're not heading that way just a little bit.
The unspoken prerequisite for a functional society in which human labor has ever decreasing "economic value" is the end of capitalism itself.
It's hard to see the path forward from this nadir, but Le Guin offers some words of hope:
> We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
The tech right would convince us we only need robot-remixed content, and that the future is slop all the way down. We have to prove them wrong.
I get that someone wanted to let steam off but this just sounds like they don't have any arguments so they went for the good old "in the future, you won't have free will and social media companies force you to be online" fable. An addicting algorithm isn't the same thing as fentanyl, you can uninstall the app in 5 seconds and getting it back with signing in takes atleast two minutes, enough to reconsider whether you actually want to spend time on it.
The toxicity of apps like Tiktok comes from muscle memory, not the quality of the content. Your thumb knows where the app icon is and opening the app happens quicker than you can think (literally). So offloading or uninstalling breaks this very effectively. The only thing that would still keep you on the platform is social connections. If somebody gets upset over you uninstalling Instagram or Snapchat, they aren't a good friend.
I don't think this goes far enough -- its a best case scenario.
There is no Utopia for mankind at the end of an AGI that is the labor force because people need a purpose; without that, degenerate behaviours and vice are easy to fall into and the spiral is not big. The state of the human race - particularly the internet-native generations - is a testament to that.
The only way the AGI Utopia works is with a massive reduction in the human population with a Spartan/Helot relationship between those remaining.
Let's face it, the people who want AGI so badly aren't the wam cuddly people who want to feed the poor, house the homeless, and cure the sick. Their motives here are not pure...
N=2 but deleting my Facebook account (~4 years ago) has effectively stopped me from arguing online about things I don’t really care about with people who I don’t know.
I mean I still do it here to some extent but much less frequently
I think the post is full of pleasantly-detailed arguments, and was a joy to read. It’s grim, but necessary to have someone write this up without the LLM assistant du jour.
Dear friends: you may not like to hear this but the profit motive is what ruins everything.
I have a degree in Economics. I have read Adam Smith (and not just the Wealth of Nations, by the way!). I spent years on this stuff. I understand markets and for some things they are indeed the best solution. No argument there.
It is a FACT that some things in life should not be done for profit.
Some things cannot be done for profit, but need to be done. These are things that we consider moral or human rights, such as feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, or sheltering the homeless. This is the realm of charity, and it was once a serious obligation for the elite as well as a central focus of religion.
But for everything else, the profit motive is unsurpassed at allocating scarce resources to their most productive uses.
Not a huge fan of the sentiment in this article, and the very cynical way it was communicated, but the references to the library of babel reminded me of this fun site.
Just hit "random." It's always gibberish. The odds of getting something that isn't gibberish are astronomically low, like winning the lottery.
The actual library Borges describes has 25^1312000 books, the very vast majority of which are utter nonsense. (As the simulator makes clear.)
Yet with AI, we're getting an abundance of very credible -- and, as Tao himself notes, frequently correct -- mathematical proofs. In these new AI math results, the ratio of signal to noise is high, which makes our current situation the exact opposite of the library, which is pure noise where signal emerges only by random necessity.
I wish I never had to see this type of comment un-flagged on HN. Every time I do, I feel like I should leave, even though it's the last place on the internet I will engage with. It's a scary leap to make - to have nowhere left online to read or write.
> Fortunately, OpenAI has brought us one step closer to realizing Borges’s vision. Rather than generating every possible mathematical paper, they’ve found a way to probabilistically generate things that look correct.
Or at least ask your favorite LLM to read it, then give it your knee-jerk comment and ask it to check if it's already covered on the text. This saves you from wasting time using your own brain.
> From what I know about the academic community (mostly from Twitter and LinkedIn, which I assume are representative), there seems to be near-unanimous agreement that the purpose of math and science research is to gather a large quantity of potentially true factoids in a repository that nobody will actually ever read, in a ritual called “advancing humanity’s[3] knowledge”. That these results are well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at, or even completely correct is a secondary concern — in fact, in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans.
Am I the only who thinks this is rhetorical? Modern mathematics is so far removed from the base average knowledge (lets just assume high school instead of going to axioms) that the only people who understand most (if not all new) mathematical achievement are the mathematicians themselves, heck not even all mathematicians, it needs to be spread and developed from "hot spots"?
Your math results are not "well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at" unless you literally operate with two or three levels within the proof paper compared to the average person who probably starts at an order of magnitude levels higher.
To the average person, asking a mathematician to explain something is the same as asking the AI/LLM. Both are asking an oracle to dumb it down to their level of abstraction.
To the person who are not career mathematicians, both LLMs and mathematicians do the same thing, pump out garbled output that they themselves understand, and to mathematicians, the difference is one probably explains using axioms rather than theorems.
As a mere software engineer, I found that many human written papers in my field (DSP, ML) aren’t exactly well-written, easily understandable or pleasant to read either, and it’s been the case for at least 15 years. In the past, I would frequently spend an hour or two trying to read a SOTA paper full of convoluted prose and dense pages of equations, only to realise that the algorithm is incredibly simple if visualised properly or even just written down as pseudocode.
Now with LLMs the process is much shorter. They can walk me through the algorithm step by step, translate it to pseudocode, explain equations, and most importantly, I can ask them questions and get clarifications, without worrying about seeming ignorant or exhausting their patience. With a paper, you’re stuck with whatever was written (and often, researchers aren’t good teachers, or intentionally over complicate simple concepts).
> many human written papers in my field (DSP, ML) aren’t exactly well-written, easily understandable or pleasant to read
Yep, my eyes glaze over at the convoluted mathematical explanations for pathfinding in worldspace, but when I see the pseudocode in the appendix it make so much more sense.
That's simply because code is easier to read for programmers than math. For mathematicians it is the other way around. Each profession has developed their own DSLs.
I've read it, the main idea is "this isn’t just about mathematics or physics — it’s about fundamentally reimagining what it means to be human", but he still talks like all problems are solved. My point is that no only those that did not require novel creative approaches like Collatz.
>> reimagining what it means to be human. By outsourcing the burdens of curiosity, creativity, and understanding, we can finally focus on what matters most
... the fact that this shit doesn't even scrape the ass of more than 500 million people, 60% of which are utterly useless with or without (mit oder mit ohne) ... neither sacrasm, nor cnysims or inorys will uplift this worst of all narratives ever written.
> First, they came for the artists,
and I did not speak out, because I was not an artist.
// actually FIRST they came for the programmers. and many of us were ultimately ULTIMATELY pretty tickled to get such a massive productivity boost. this anti-AI sentiment as seen here and in Jon Stewart's rant that all AI is good for is optimizing shopping carts or something... it's so upsetting see good folks buying into this and not realizing how much benefit it will bring. If anything, I've seen how much amazing power it has now given programmers such as myself... I can do what would take me years in an afternoon.
// Btw, can we retire the "first they came for the..." template, it's a little tired.
Diffusion models were the first gen AI tech to plausibly be able to replace humans, no? I feel like image generation was ahead of text generation 2015-2022, and prior to 2015 the best "gen AI" was markov chains which I don't think is within the scope of what we're talking about.
> Looking up at the stars in wonderment, or enjoying a complex puzzle game, or being inspired by an encouraging teacher, and dreaming that one day an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand as part of a marketing gimmick to raise hype for an IPO[2].
But if I am going to critique it's main point it would be this part:
> in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans. It is inefficient to explain or check a result when those resources can be spent generating another.
While obviously ridiculous, I think this does not go far enough. The problem isn't that people don't care and resources should not be spent to explain AI results to human minds, the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans. The puzzle then changes from can AI formally verify and explain a proof to: do human minds trust the proof. Do we believe that the proof is correct and not an elaborate AI hallucination using tricks that are beyond our understanding. In order to trust it a formal verification is not enough unless it is human understandable. In fact human understandability is the only thing that matters. That is something that AI can never do on its own.
Well, we can try tying it to ground truth. AI does the math for magnetic field containment? Test it. AI predicts a particle? Test it. AI says P=NP? Ok, factor this in polynomial time.
And if it fails, and AI goes, "I don't know what happened. I relied on these papers" then I guess one of those must be wrong.
I'm not saying it'd be easy, but I think AI can also find the pieces of the puzzle that broke a pyramid of "discoveries" culminating in a disproval,
And the only other option is to simply never understand as much. AI has the potential to understand things humans cannot. Not necessarily a strict superset.
Humans can deal in 5+-2 things at once. AI doesn't have to, and can cut through leaky abstractions.
If AI says a new invention will do X, and it doesn't, it'll say "you're absolutely right" and try again until it does the thing.
> an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand
He'd have more of a point if a huge number of humans weren't occupied doing exactly this, and much worse on top.
It may not be the most prescient or innovative sci fi series, but I read The Three Body Problem a few years ago and it's really stuck with me. Specifically the description of how humanity reached an inflection point in math & physics research that almost immediately unlocked novel innovations in applied science ... which then made space exploration & settlement practical. Moreover, that the antagonist society in the series decided their absolute best bet at avoiding complete annihilation was to hamstring humankind's scientific research -- and that's it.
It feels like frontier models are starting to approach an asymptote where what you suggest could become reality, and we'll begin seeing not just AI research but AI-designed & led applications of that research into fundamental parts of our society & culture. For better and for worse.
> the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans
(I assume you mean explain itself to humans here.)
I keep seeing people saying this as fact. It might, but it might not, and there are various reasons one might be skeptical that it will, using current techniques. Not least among these is that explaining something well to a human requires a degree of empathy and sophisticated theory-of-mind that LLMs have not yet exhibited yet*, and that is an area where humans are uniquely advantaged by being humans.
Someone will almost certainly reply by just stating as fact that they will achieve this goal, or pointing out that past predictions that LLMs wouldn't be able to do particular things have failed, and that's all very will. I certainly wouldn't be rash enough to claim it's impossible, but there are still models of all this available that are consistent with all the successes so far but don't predict "LLMs can do anything and will do everything". We'll find out in due course.
* My idle speculation is that a lack of decent theory-of-mind is why LLMs still suck at using the "it's not X it's Y" construct. I doubt they actually use it any more frequently than humans when writing on the same topics, but they use it wrong and it's jarring. This particular rhetorical flourish works when there's some actual reason to think that X is an idea that might actually be present or forming in the mind of someone reading the passage (or in some other mind that they in turn might be imagining, eg. a fictional character), and that explitly calling it out and negating it will have a particular dramatic effect. LLMs probably use it with about the expected frequency, but they use it for that reason (frequency) and then come up with something to put in the X and Y slots. The result often jars because the X it uses just isn't something relevant to the reader's thought process and/or the Y isn't a convincing, persuasive or relevant counterpoint to it. The result is that they stick out and seem more frequent than they are.
fair points but i disagree. LLMs are very good about explaining and summarizing complicated material. You can test this today with any modern LLM about any topic or paper you like. One thing that makes them so powerful is that they can customize their explanation to the specific querier.
Today, to explain and communicate these math proofs, it makes sense that a human working with an LLM would be the most effective at human explanation. However, given LLMs current abilities with explanation, it seems reasonable that LLMs will become equal to human experts in explanation. Again part of their power is that they can scale to 1-on-1 explanations for the particular audience which humans cannot do.
> "it's not X it's Y" construct.
I agree this is annoying, but this is not a fundamental feature of LLMs, this is "tick" of current models, like the em-dash. There have been countless of these "ticks" that have been refined and this process will continue.
100% agree. In fact, this issue of verifiability is not at all unique to AI. It was a profound and growing issue before the advent of useful AI. Perhaps the issue was best elucidated by Dr. Anthony Fauci when he suggested that we "Believe the science" as a rational for why people should follow his covid prescriptions. I side with those who feel that Dr Fauci was really just trying to do his best. Regardless, with that statement he cut the foundation out from under the whole scientific project! Science (and math) are not to be believed. They are to be tested!
We have moved quite a long way down the "believe the science" road already, and for good reason. Belief is much (!) faster and cheaper than proof, so those who are fed good science(math) and believe it tend to outcompete people who get stuck trying to prove things all the time.
But fraud is fraud regardless of the platform (meat or silicon) committing it. People who believe in frauds often end up worse off for it, though it hard to know which piece of BS has led you astray or who's to blame for it or how to deal with the fall out.
Obviously, we shouldn't believe AI any more than we believe humans. That said, the world was already suffering greatly under the weight of human generated BS long before useful AI came on the scene. Now that AI has reduced the cost of producing plausible BS by orders of magnitude, we may need some new methods for BS detection.
Beneath the sarcasm it's making a rather simplistic argument that OpenAI cares little about human understanding of the results or their correctness.
The author appears to argue that this in service of a pointless goal, that no one will even care to read the results, and that all this is taking away from human creativity and removing the fun in scientific discovery.
I don't see a convincing argument here that OpenAI does not in fact aim to further humanity's understanding of mathematics, or that using AI for scientific discovery is comparable to automating away the fun parts of life.
The sarcasm is rhetorically strong, but profound? I don't think so.
OpenAI certainly does not really care about human understanding of these math problems. We've always said solving the hardest math problems would be a remarkable demonstration of AGI, and here is their demonstration. But it's not really about the math, this is about the power of LLMs and the path to AGI/ASI. Solving math problems is just a parlor trick for OpenAI.
Saying that OpenAI does this only to show off their models, rather than also advance mathematics or at the very least their model's mathematical capabilities, seems purely speculative.
I understand OpenAI published write-ups for each problem.
It's unclear to me what other expectations mathematicians have that would demonstrate OpenAI's commitment to advancing mathematics.
Last I heard they asked to completely stop solving math problems with AI, which seems just ridiculous.
There are plenty of things we use and found useful before we understood them. We knew how to make it, how it works was for the most part inconsequential.
the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans
But will it? What's the trend on the metrics for this? Everything else has metrics, why not this?
I mostly work on getting ChatGPT to come up with algorithms, which it is moderately good at. When I ask it to summarize it's findings, the results are less understandable to me than what it said originally.
I don't believe that it's always getting better at everything everywhere. It's no doubt getting better at many things but even there it seems clear the rate vary.
I feel this way about code. Writing things by hand is the quickest way for me to fully understand it, and that is what I am paid to do, to understand it. It will be executed millions and millions of times for every time it is modified, so even if writing it by hand is 10x or 100x as slow, it is still a better payoff.
I think here the question is what is the goal? If the goal of the code is to learn and teach, then understandability is critical. If the goal to efficiently produce useful software, then that is not necessarily the case, because the end-users could not care less if the code is understandable. They just want it to work. And maybe understandability and "working" are correlated, but not necessarily.
I sympathize with some feelings the author is trying to communicate, but the cynical and sarcastic style really detract from the authors points in my view.
I don't think this article communicates any new ideas; to me the style is the unique aspect of it that makes it worth reading. If you personally don't like the style, there are many other articles portraying the same sentiment in a more agreeable style.
So, would most people, and this would mean that very little housing would be built, very little health care provided, and very little food grown or harvested.
well I'd be willing to help build housing, provide health care, and grow food as needed given the stability it provides
right now my contract is more or less "we'll keep paying you if you continue providing us with the arbitrary value we require" which is certainly more difficult to reckon with
I think the author is hiding the ball a bit. The problem is that, for a long time, humans have attributed meaning, value, and social status to great cognitive insights. Taking physics as an example, it has almost always been the theorists who develop new ideas, not the experimentalists that test and validate them, who have won praise and acclaim. The name Arthur Eddington doesn’t have the same cachet as that of Albert Einstein. But now that the creation of those insights can be automated, there is a great wrenching as esteem shifts away from the former.
Well, maybe it’s a good thing that we are seeing this shift. Maybe it is good and right that we begin valuing your ability to exist in the real world, rather than play math puzzles on a sheet of paper. Because, while the AI labs are receiving a lot of attention and excitement now, that’s a short run phenomenon. Ultimately, people aren’t impressed for long by a machine doing something novel. Once it’s up and running, it fades into the background just like the combustion engine, or the dishwasher, or electric lighting.
> The problem is that, for a long time, humans have attributed meaning, value, and social status to great cognitive insights.
Not really, they haven't. It's only when those insights can be communicated in such a way to other people that those other people can find utility (which could be enabling them to derive more insights that yet other people find utility in recursively) in the insights that they do so, and this is a huge difference. This is why AI is such a total problem to this mentality, because it disrupts not only insight production but the mechanism that values insight production.
Of course cognition was labor and it had a significant value attributed to it because it was they only way to figure things out. Now are you saying that devaluing it is A ok because cognition can be automated by stealing from those who figured it all and now cognition is overpriced? If that was true, the machine wouldn't take its content from those humans but it does. It is built on top of human collective cognition and knowledge.
If Ai is something novel for now and then it will be all ok? Just dream on; would you be happy if your job was replaced.. what about your kids.. If that is the case , then enjoy. It is demoralizing for a lot of people who will be replaced by a better thinking machines.
It is no longer about the automation alone but also humans will change to avoid competing with the machine because humans will lose that race just like how they lose when playing chess with the machine.
Why Ai? Because its development was pretty much free and paid by the pension funds. The objective is supremacy and being the first entity and country to collect rent via Ai supremacy and block every other entity in their analysis; reality who knows what will happen..
It started with internet which was subsidized through military for sake of military supremacy and then it transformed to become a utility connecting everything and collecting information and it subsidized by the markets to collect rent from the world using this utility and now it is subsidized to replace labor around the world by knowing everything that humans know and to collect rent from its use to discount labor.
All the nihilism in the AI space is so tiresome. We have a tool now that can accelerate the technological development of our species and actually reach for the stars! How exciting! All these ruminations and lamentations about what it means to be human are downright laughable to people on the front lines of war, living in abject poverty, etc. "Oh, to be so lucky!", I'm sure they'd say.
The luddites and doomers should do the world a favor and go establish a commune in rural Alaska, then they can be happy and the rest of us can get back to building and playing with amazing technology!
> All the nihilism in the AI space is so tiresome. We have a tool now that can accelerate the technological development of our species and actually reach for the stars!
Lol buzzword soup. What marketing department do you work for?
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 65.8 ms ] threadGrim but this is exactly where society is heading.
Because most people in the world are working around the clock to supply food and shelter for their family. It's a bit unclear still how you are going to consolidate the two facts
Some of those people were mathematicians, engineers, physicists who found joy in being skilled at what they do and were able to be financially rewarded for their effort applying their skill. Are these artistic pursuits, subcultures, pick-up leagues, etc going to pay their mortgage? Will they help them get a job in a field they are trained in?
The "free to pursue more important things" is a hand-wavy statement that doesn't talk at all about what those people should be doing to provide for themselves after wages plummet. The hyperbole is drawing attention to the ridiculousness, not making a comment about there not being a rec soccer league or something.
IMHO, we should be structuring society to provide maximum opportunity and remuneration for creative, engaging professions. Instead we have capitalism.
> The "free to pursue more important things" is a hand-wavy statement that doesn't talk at all about what those people should be doing to provide for themselves after wages plummet. The hyperbole is drawing attention to the ridiculousness, not making a comment about there not being a rec soccer league or something.
Exactly, "free to pursue more important things" is a pleasant-sounding way to say "It's not my problem, fuck off an die for all I care."
Now the "beaten paths" (our public spaces) are getting spammed, polluted and destroyed, turn into jungles to the point that actually just walking off into the jungle can be easier for some. But that is lame, even for the very few people who can do it (many people can't right now, future generations won't be able to at all if we let this slide), why not drive the parasitic assholes ruining our public spaces off into the jungle instead?
It's hard to see the path forward from this nadir, but Le Guin offers some words of hope:
> We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
The tech right would convince us we only need robot-remixed content, and that the future is slop all the way down. We have to prove them wrong.
The toxicity of apps like Tiktok comes from muscle memory, not the quality of the content. Your thumb knows where the app icon is and opening the app happens quicker than you can think (literally). So offloading or uninstalling breaks this very effectively. The only thing that would still keep you on the platform is social connections. If somebody gets upset over you uninstalling Instagram or Snapchat, they aren't a good friend.
There is no Utopia for mankind at the end of an AGI that is the labor force because people need a purpose; without that, degenerate behaviours and vice are easy to fall into and the spiral is not big. The state of the human race - particularly the internet-native generations - is a testament to that.
The only way the AGI Utopia works is with a massive reduction in the human population with a Spartan/Helot relationship between those remaining.
Let's face it, the people who want AGI so badly aren't the wam cuddly people who want to feed the poor, house the homeless, and cure the sick. Their motives here are not pure...
For you, maybe. You can't assume that applies to everyone.
I mean I still do it here to some extent but much less frequently
guilty
Make it your problem to find problems that AI have not yet solved. Problem solved.
I have a degree in Economics. I have read Adam Smith (and not just the Wealth of Nations, by the way!). I spent years on this stuff. I understand markets and for some things they are indeed the best solution. No argument there.
It is a FACT that some things in life should not be done for profit.
All I needed was entering a game of Monopoly after a few rounds had already been played.
But for everything else, the profit motive is unsurpassed at allocating scarce resources to their most productive uses.
https://libraryofbabel.info
There's a library of babel simulator here: https://libraryofbabel.info/
Just hit "random." It's always gibberish. The odds of getting something that isn't gibberish are astronomically low, like winning the lottery.
The actual library Borges describes has 25^1312000 books, the very vast majority of which are utter nonsense. (As the simulator makes clear.)
Yet with AI, we're getting an abundance of very credible -- and, as Tao himself notes, frequently correct -- mathematical proofs. In these new AI math results, the ratio of signal to noise is high, which makes our current situation the exact opposite of the library, which is pure noise where signal emerges only by random necessity.
Causes:
Am I the only who thinks this is rhetorical? Modern mathematics is so far removed from the base average knowledge (lets just assume high school instead of going to axioms) that the only people who understand most (if not all new) mathematical achievement are the mathematicians themselves, heck not even all mathematicians, it needs to be spread and developed from "hot spots"?
Your math results are not "well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at" unless you literally operate with two or three levels within the proof paper compared to the average person who probably starts at an order of magnitude levels higher.
To the average person, asking a mathematician to explain something is the same as asking the AI/LLM. Both are asking an oracle to dumb it down to their level of abstraction.
To the person who are not career mathematicians, both LLMs and mathematicians do the same thing, pump out garbled output that they themselves understand, and to mathematicians, the difference is one probably explains using axioms rather than theorems.
Now with LLMs the process is much shorter. They can walk me through the algorithm step by step, translate it to pseudocode, explain equations, and most importantly, I can ask them questions and get clarifications, without worrying about seeming ignorant or exhausting their patience. With a paper, you’re stuck with whatever was written (and often, researchers aren’t good teachers, or intentionally over complicate simple concepts).
Yep, my eyes glaze over at the convoluted mathematical explanations for pathfinding in worldspace, but when I see the pseudocode in the appendix it make so much more sense.
What about the Collatz conjecture? AFAIK, it requires some novel approaches to mathematics, which would be a real testament to AI creative skills.
I don't doubt it will be solved some day, but as of now it's too early to say that all our problems are solved.
... the fact that this shit doesn't even scrape the ass of more than 500 million people, 60% of which are utterly useless with or without (mit oder mit ohne) ... neither sacrasm, nor cnysims or inorys will uplift this worst of all narratives ever written.
this is all soooooo baaaaaad
// actually FIRST they came for the programmers. and many of us were ultimately ULTIMATELY pretty tickled to get such a massive productivity boost. this anti-AI sentiment as seen here and in Jon Stewart's rant that all AI is good for is optimizing shopping carts or something... it's so upsetting see good folks buying into this and not realizing how much benefit it will bring. If anything, I've seen how much amazing power it has now given programmers such as myself... I can do what would take me years in an afternoon.
// Btw, can we retire the "first they came for the..." template, it's a little tired.
> Looking up at the stars in wonderment, or enjoying a complex puzzle game, or being inspired by an encouraging teacher, and dreaming that one day an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand as part of a marketing gimmick to raise hype for an IPO[2].
But if I am going to critique it's main point it would be this part:
> in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans. It is inefficient to explain or check a result when those resources can be spent generating another.
While obviously ridiculous, I think this does not go far enough. The problem isn't that people don't care and resources should not be spent to explain AI results to human minds, the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans. The puzzle then changes from can AI formally verify and explain a proof to: do human minds trust the proof. Do we believe that the proof is correct and not an elaborate AI hallucination using tricks that are beyond our understanding. In order to trust it a formal verification is not enough unless it is human understandable. In fact human understandability is the only thing that matters. That is something that AI can never do on its own.
And if it fails, and AI goes, "I don't know what happened. I relied on these papers" then I guess one of those must be wrong.
I'm not saying it'd be easy, but I think AI can also find the pieces of the puzzle that broke a pyramid of "discoveries" culminating in a disproval,
And the only other option is to simply never understand as much. AI has the potential to understand things humans cannot. Not necessarily a strict superset.
Humans can deal in 5+-2 things at once. AI doesn't have to, and can cut through leaky abstractions.
If AI says a new invention will do X, and it doesn't, it'll say "you're absolutely right" and try again until it does the thing.
I mean... doomsday scenarios aside.
He'd have more of a point if a huge number of humans weren't occupied doing exactly this, and much worse on top.
It feels like frontier models are starting to approach an asymptote where what you suggest could become reality, and we'll begin seeing not just AI research but AI-designed & led applications of that research into fundamental parts of our society & culture. For better and for worse.
(I assume you mean explain itself to humans here.)
I keep seeing people saying this as fact. It might, but it might not, and there are various reasons one might be skeptical that it will, using current techniques. Not least among these is that explaining something well to a human requires a degree of empathy and sophisticated theory-of-mind that LLMs have not yet exhibited yet*, and that is an area where humans are uniquely advantaged by being humans.
Someone will almost certainly reply by just stating as fact that they will achieve this goal, or pointing out that past predictions that LLMs wouldn't be able to do particular things have failed, and that's all very will. I certainly wouldn't be rash enough to claim it's impossible, but there are still models of all this available that are consistent with all the successes so far but don't predict "LLMs can do anything and will do everything". We'll find out in due course.
* My idle speculation is that a lack of decent theory-of-mind is why LLMs still suck at using the "it's not X it's Y" construct. I doubt they actually use it any more frequently than humans when writing on the same topics, but they use it wrong and it's jarring. This particular rhetorical flourish works when there's some actual reason to think that X is an idea that might actually be present or forming in the mind of someone reading the passage (or in some other mind that they in turn might be imagining, eg. a fictional character), and that explitly calling it out and negating it will have a particular dramatic effect. LLMs probably use it with about the expected frequency, but they use it for that reason (frequency) and then come up with something to put in the X and Y slots. The result often jars because the X it uses just isn't something relevant to the reader's thought process and/or the Y isn't a convincing, persuasive or relevant counterpoint to it. The result is that they stick out and seem more frequent than they are.
Today, to explain and communicate these math proofs, it makes sense that a human working with an LLM would be the most effective at human explanation. However, given LLMs current abilities with explanation, it seems reasonable that LLMs will become equal to human experts in explanation. Again part of their power is that they can scale to 1-on-1 explanations for the particular audience which humans cannot do.
> "it's not X it's Y" construct.
I agree this is annoying, but this is not a fundamental feature of LLMs, this is "tick" of current models, like the em-dash. There have been countless of these "ticks" that have been refined and this process will continue.
We have moved quite a long way down the "believe the science" road already, and for good reason. Belief is much (!) faster and cheaper than proof, so those who are fed good science(math) and believe it tend to outcompete people who get stuck trying to prove things all the time.
But fraud is fraud regardless of the platform (meat or silicon) committing it. People who believe in frauds often end up worse off for it, though it hard to know which piece of BS has led you astray or who's to blame for it or how to deal with the fall out.
Obviously, we shouldn't believe AI any more than we believe humans. That said, the world was already suffering greatly under the weight of human generated BS long before useful AI came on the scene. Now that AI has reduced the cost of producing plausible BS by orders of magnitude, we may need some new methods for BS detection.
Beneath the sarcasm it's making a rather simplistic argument that OpenAI cares little about human understanding of the results or their correctness.
The author appears to argue that this in service of a pointless goal, that no one will even care to read the results, and that all this is taking away from human creativity and removing the fun in scientific discovery.
I don't see a convincing argument here that OpenAI does not in fact aim to further humanity's understanding of mathematics, or that using AI for scientific discovery is comparable to automating away the fun parts of life.
The sarcasm is rhetorically strong, but profound? I don't think so.
Saying that OpenAI does this only to show off their models, rather than also advance mathematics or at the very least their model's mathematical capabilities, seems purely speculative.
I understand OpenAI published write-ups for each problem.
It's unclear to me what other expectations mathematicians have that would demonstrate OpenAI's commitment to advancing mathematics.
Last I heard they asked to completely stop solving math problems with AI, which seems just ridiculous.
But will it? What's the trend on the metrics for this? Everything else has metrics, why not this?
I mostly work on getting ChatGPT to come up with algorithms, which it is moderately good at. When I ask it to summarize it's findings, the results are less understandable to me than what it said originally.
I don't believe that it's always getting better at everything everywhere. It's no doubt getting better at many things but even there it seems clear the rate vary.
You can sense the fear and anxiety in that article.
Is existence not enough anymore? Do humans need more?
I'm in the office and was trying to contain my laughter next to my colleagues, but this tipped me over the edge
well yeah the purpose of STEM education is to be a factory to produce the correct worker for another factory
if I had guaranteed access to housing, healthcare, and food I'd stop immediately
right now my contract is more or less "we'll keep paying you if you continue providing us with the arbitrary value we require" which is certainly more difficult to reckon with
Well, maybe it’s a good thing that we are seeing this shift. Maybe it is good and right that we begin valuing your ability to exist in the real world, rather than play math puzzles on a sheet of paper. Because, while the AI labs are receiving a lot of attention and excitement now, that’s a short run phenomenon. Ultimately, people aren’t impressed for long by a machine doing something novel. Once it’s up and running, it fades into the background just like the combustion engine, or the dishwasher, or electric lighting.
Not really, they haven't. It's only when those insights can be communicated in such a way to other people that those other people can find utility (which could be enabling them to derive more insights that yet other people find utility in recursively) in the insights that they do so, and this is a huge difference. This is why AI is such a total problem to this mentality, because it disrupts not only insight production but the mechanism that values insight production.
If Ai is something novel for now and then it will be all ok? Just dream on; would you be happy if your job was replaced.. what about your kids.. If that is the case , then enjoy. It is demoralizing for a lot of people who will be replaced by a better thinking machines.
It is no longer about the automation alone but also humans will change to avoid competing with the machine because humans will lose that race just like how they lose when playing chess with the machine.
It started with internet which was subsidized through military for sake of military supremacy and then it transformed to become a utility connecting everything and collecting information and it subsidized by the markets to collect rent from the world using this utility and now it is subsidized to replace labor around the world by knowing everything that humans know and to collect rent from its use to discount labor.
The luddites and doomers should do the world a favor and go establish a commune in rural Alaska, then they can be happy and the rest of us can get back to building and playing with amazing technology!
Lol buzzword soup. What marketing department do you work for?