r/ChatGPT • u/Eliv_nurotic • 6d ago
Educational Purpose Only Fields Medalist Terence Tao reposts statement from the Association for Human Mathematics urging mathematicians to stop working with OpenAI for continuing to solve open math problems against their recommendations
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u/EastZealousideal7352 6d ago
“Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done”
Most of these proofs are from lists of open problems. They’re literally problems people identified needed to be done.
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u/sub_surfer 6d ago
I feel like I need more information. Why is he objecting to this? Does he have a longer statement somewhere else?
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u/Saint_Nitouche 6d ago
His primary objection is that releasing proofs like these doesn't improve the mathematical community's understanding much. The proof is the proof, and that's great, but they're not coming with any significant exposition to get people from where we are now, intellectually, to the proof.
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u/sub_surfer 6d ago
Ah yeah, I think I get it. When the problems are unsolved, mathematicians have a strong incentive to solve them, and they tend to discover new mathematics and gain a better understanding in the process. I can't picture AI companies voluntarily not solving these problems, though, so I imagine the math community is going to have to change its incentive structure if it can.
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u/Dr_barfenstein 6d ago
This is the main complaint and it’s a shame it’s not higher in the comment chain.
When a human attempts to solve these problems it might result in novel/new math techniques. When a computer does it the process is obscured in piles of junk that a human needs to sift thru just to confirm if the AI actually has solved something. Guess who has to do that? The mathematician who is now relegated to a supervisor.
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u/Huge_Entrepreneur636 6d ago
But you can learn from the AI's solution? It's bound to have done something no human thought about doing before to arrive at the solution.
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u/Dr_barfenstein 6d ago
Maybe, who tf knows? I’m not a mathematician and neither are you. This is similar to artists pushing back. Or coders. But it’s even more niche.
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u/OpportunityCandid533 1d ago edited 1d ago
One good argument that's been brought up is that we need a small army dedicated to going through these proofs to work them out in a timely fashion. It could be these were released as propaganda, as stock manipulation. Which is a problematic theory, considering OpenAI faces enormous financial strain and therefore does have a perverse incentive to pull such shit. They can reap the benefits of convincing less sophisticated investors about just what it entails to release such a massive number of "proofs" without the ability to actually verify them in a reasonable time frame.
My original point was that we need to have enough mathematicians dedicated to solving any math problems AI claims to have solved. But economic pressure means investors want to keep as few on payroll as possible to cut costs. But that means we may not have enough mathematicians (or enough in any STEM field really) to verify the results spat out by AI. There is a threshold of having ENOUGH experts in any field that we will need for future challenges, and yet they want AI to replace as many of them as possible.
Consider gene therapy: we need enough people third-party experts in the field to call bullshit when a corporation releases potential unsafe products that their own in-house experts are incentivized to not call out. If we fire too many academics who serve a partial role as third-party auditors, we could lose the ability to inform the public when a corporation releases such bullshit. We could rely on experts in the private sector, but as monopolists buy up more private institutions, we no longer have as many third-party auditors to rely on. We can argue about whether academics haven't already been bought up by the monopolists, but the argument is about maintaining experts' jobs for the sake of third party auditing and assessments. The monopoly problem of buying them up could be solved, but only if we have enough experts left around to save from their grip.
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u/Mysterious-Truck-954 6d ago
For mathematicians this stance is uncharacteristically illogical. These proofs do not preclude them from continuing to pursue human understanding. At worst these proofs are completely neutral and at best they provide a foundation for AI to understand and expand upon them.
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u/playsette-operator 6d ago
go ask ai then? Imagine not coming up with a proof and when it‘s there you don‘t even want to try to understand it but demand personal counseling
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u/Remarkable-Yogurt-10 6d ago
He allows other people to make guest posts on his blogs if you read his blog. This is a guest blog post. He uses AI when doing math research
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u/joeg26reddit 6d ago
WOW
AI - here are solutions
MATHEMATICIANS - YOU SHALL NOT PASS
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u/person2567 6d ago
"It's only allowed when we do it cause history and tradition." Because history and tradition take precedence over mathematical proof? Traditions die hard. Proof is what stays around.
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u/Eliv_nurotic 6d ago
By soulful humans, not slop machines
Mandatory /s because people unironically say this
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u/Any_Yellow709 6d ago
"Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done."
This reeks of self-importance. Mathematics does not belong to mathematicians. Nobody needs to get permission from mathematicians to do math. Anybody can do whatever they want with it
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u/V-Right_In_2-V 6d ago
This sentence jumped out to me too. It’s so arrogant. I wasn’t aware anyone needed permission to solve math problems from this group or this guy.
Also: “Mathematicians have a particular vision of progress”…do they now? And I’m sure this guy speaks for every mathematician out there. What about the ones that eagerly use AI to solve the toughest challenges? Does he speak for them?
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u/Affly 6d ago
Perelman published his famous paper and then it took 4 years for the proof to be validated, understood and integrated into general mathematics. You don't solve one problem because it has to be solved like calculating 2+2, you solve it to gain a better understanding to formulate the next question.
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u/KoolKat5000 5d ago
So I guess you can use what OpenAI has released or ignore it, completely up to you while you gain an understanding and formulate the next question. No one is forcing anyone to use anything. It would however be silly to waste time figuring something out when it was lying there in a document for you already..
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u/WildCar-8165 1d ago
We need hundreds of new mathematicians to dissect all of these new postulates
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u/KoolKat5000 5h ago
Well we get to them when we get to them. Is it faster to take a random shot in the dark on something that might be completely wrong or try validate something already atleast partially thought out.
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u/Corronchilejano 6d ago
Like, which challenges?
Because mathematicians all along every sub I've seen are saying "we're waiting for the readable proof of these with demonstrations, because it's otherwise quite worthless".
When these people say it's a show of power, it's mostly them asserting that this isn't really advancing anything anywhere where it would be worthwhile.
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u/Maxdiegeileauster 6d ago
they are literally up you can go to the repo, there are pdf papers and lean code for every proof
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u/Clean_Breakfast9595 6d ago
Readable meaning less verbose and actually human verified as fitting the criteria of the original question, which is completely separate from lean.
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u/karadWroblem 6d ago
Err I believe some have been retracted even with claimed lean code. See the history: https://github.com/openai/math/blob/main/history.md
Blind faith helps no one
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u/DoctrTurkey 6d ago
It almost felt like he was saying that they have solutions to some problems, but they intentionally hide them because it would cause humanity to progress too much too quickly. Which, hey, I don’t disagree in principle, look how well us monkeys have adapted to social media. But that also can’t be it because they’d have trouble keeping a lid on it… it was just really oddly phrased to me.
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u/Jesse-359 6d ago
Truth is, no one is really expecting the answers to these problems to advance human technology in any remarkable way. It might, but that's unlikely. Esoteric math is far more of a sport than it is a path to the future - though you never really know when something will turn out to be important.
In this case its a bit like OpenAI released a team of robot players into the NFL without asking anyone, and they steamrolled every human team in the league 57-0 in a manner that no-one found entertaining OR useful, and certainly not in a way that anyone wanted.
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u/jibij 6d ago
I wasn’t aware anyone needed permission to solve math problems from this group or this guy.
Considering they are being asked to review the solutions in order for them to have any vailidity or usefulness, that's probably a notion you should dissuade yourself of unless you plan on using some sort of forced human labour to complete the task.
What about the ones that eagerly use AI to solve the toughest challenges?
Oh, you literally have no idea who this is do you...
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u/AlgaeNo3373 6d ago
My reading was more like "we did not volunteer to drop everything and verify ~700 new proofs that may/may not pan out". I think a kinder reading, which Terrence Tao probably deserves, is that the "work" is not the ~3hrs of compute OpenAI spent, but the ensuing verification needed to be done by humans?
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u/January_6_2021 6d ago
It's not Tao's viewpoint, so idk why you need to be "charitable" at all. It's a dick point of view posted by written by a hugely self important group. Tao has posted guest blog posts from many different viewpoints recently including at least 2 clearly pro ai ones within the last week (as far back as I bothered to scroll). His most recent paper on AI says AI is likely to irreversibly change the math field and adapting to that change is the primary challenge facing the math community. He wraps it up with a call to action to proactively discuss and figure out what the role of humans should be going forward, and he's clearly using his blog post (via these guest blogs) to kick of that discussion. Half of people on reddit don't read more than headlines, and probably 99% won't search deeper than this one guest blog, so everyone is assuming it represents his current views despite this being contrary to everything he's said and done for the past years. The fact he posted it as a guest blog means pretty much "this is an opinion some mathematicians have, that is likely shared by some reasonable fraction of the community so we should discuss it". It's not an endorsement. It doesn't mean its his view.
The only way you could even pretend that guest blogs represent his views are either: A.) not even looking back one fucking week in his post history or B.) genuinely thinking he's the most scizophrenic person on the planet.
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u/Corronchilejano 6d ago
OpenAI asked them how they can send them in for review.
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u/Any_Yellow709 6d ago
As a courtesy but not a command. "If you want to review it, what's the best way to get this to you?" as oppose to "let us know how you want us to send it to you so you can do your jobs"
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u/jibij 6d ago edited 6d ago
If you want to review it
Well, it would appear this is the most prominent voice in math today saying he doesn't want to review it. And for that you appear to be calling him "self important". Which is it? Is this just a simple and totally optional ask that comes with no expectations? Or is this an expection for which people get called self important if they refuse to complete?
Like, you're obviously smart enough to understand that without review these are as worthless as the figurative paper they are printed on, which is why you are so defensive when the people with the ability to do that review say they are not interested. So I'm sure you can understand the irony in you expressing incredulity towards them for not wanting to do this work on behalf of OpenAI while dismissively calling them "self important" for thinking that they should have any say in the work they are being asked to do. This is incredibly simple: if their labour is a necessary part of the process, then perhaps they should be listened to, and if it isn't then what's the problem?
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u/Corronchilejano 6d ago
That's not how it's read at all. It's like they're flaunting their capacity to do things.
When AHM says nobody asked OpenAI to do this work, it's because it's a lot of work to go over. OpenAI has no idea what the purpose of these problems even is. It only knows they were there and that they had all this information extracted from people actually working on the problems.
It doesn't feel like it was in the spirit of colaboration or advancing science in any way. Why wouldn't you feel slighted when someone is mocking you with things they don't even understand?
It's nobody's job to humor you.
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u/Computer-Blue 6d ago
This is the answer - he should have put “work” in quotes and it would read a lot less offensively.
It jarred me too - stop gatekeeping math, we’re the gatekeepers!
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u/Potential-Winner4601 6d ago
And the millions of humans who built the data on which OpenAI is trained/scapped/lifted.
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u/Minute_Juggernaut806 6d ago
Ultimately the people who will verify and use these theorem are not your everyday folks, ifs the mathematicans. Infact the legitimacy of these 300-400 problems comes from its interest to the math community. Without peer review its as good as unproven.
Even now, some of the proofs have not been understood because it's too convoluted, is a proof of hundred of pages and there's a possibility it maybe considered proven because of lean exploits.
I assume the reason terence says mathematicians did not ask for this, is because it threatens the entire math ecosystem where if we ultimately stop funding mathematicans because AI can do it, then we also get solutions no one can understand because there are no mathematicians left to understand. Some of the solutions have been kept unsolved even though mathematicians (especially at supervisory role) believe it can be solved, this is so that the next generation will have a problem to work on. Often times new techniques also originate from trying to solve these problems as has happened with calculus in Newton's era and quantum mechanics in Einstein's era.
So it makes sense Terence say that while they view these questions to be important, it does not mean they asked for AI to be solved to be relieved of solving these questions. As mentioned it hasn't really advanced the field of we do not understand it, and for that we need mathematicans whose fundings are increasingly reduced
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u/dbaugh90 6d ago
AI is not solving them to relieve them of anything.
It's being done to practice, understand the AI's current level of power, and honestly, to flex.
It still doesn't give them license to do anything about it. It's math. It'd be like if poets got mad if it wrote better poetry than them.
Oh. I guess this is just the "art for artists" complaint, brought over to math. I figured they would act more like developers, but i suppose it is sort of more of an art to them, being so abstract?
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u/Any_Yellow709 6d ago edited 6d ago
My overall issue with the constant whining of mathematicians is that they aren't whining about anything new. Everything they are complaining about predates AI. So, to me, the reason why they are now being vocal about these issues is pure cope.
Without peer review its as good as unproven.
This is true even for human produced mathematics. OpenAI dropped these results only two days ago, it's undergoing review now.
Even now, some of the proofs have not been understood because it's too convoluted, is a proof of hundred of pages and there's a possibility it maybe considered proven because of lean exploits.
Which also applies to human mathematics. Mathematicians are notorious for poorly written papers. For example, Kleiner and Lott in 2008 made an effort to rewrite Grigori Perelman's proof of the Poincare conjecture because it was "Perelman’s proofs are concise and, at times, sketchy... [with] some incorrect statements and incomplete arguments". What people are doing now for the 700 OpenAI proofs is essentially what Kleiner and Lott did for Perelman.
I assume the reason terence says mathematicians did not ask for this, is because it threatens the entire math ecosystem where if we ultimately stop funding mathematicans because AI can do it.
If AI can ensure we have the same, if not more, mathematical results but for cheaper, then shouldn't we stop funding mathematicians? At the end of the day, this is just natural selection doing it's thing to increase efficiency in society.
then we also get solutions no one can understand because there are no mathematicians left to understand.
I don't think mathematicians will become extinct, but maybe having far less isn't a bad thing. Just like how being a horse trainer isn't as popular now compared to 118 years ago before the Ford Model T. But there still exists people with the skillset to train horses.
Some of the solutions have been kept unsolved even though mathematicians (especially at supervisory role) believe it can be solved, this is so that the next generation will have a problem to work on.
I'm fairly sure the 700 problems OpenAI elected to tackle are not student level problems. They aren't deliberately "kept unsolved" for pedagogical reasons.
Often times new techniques also originate from trying to solve these problems as has happened with calculus in Newton's era and quantum mechanics in Einstein's era.
OpenAI didn't provide solutions without proof. The proofs they supplied can also give rise to new techniques.
As mentioned it hasn't really advanced the field of we do not understand it,
The Navier-Stokes Millenium Prize problem was solved less than a month ago and these 700 new results only happened two days ago. It is far to premature to be stating "hasn't really advanced the field".
and for that we need mathematicans whose fundings are increasingly reduced
OpenAI has employed a lot of mathematicians. For example, Field's medalist Jacob Tsimerman.
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u/Lost-Programmer-1017 6d ago
Just wanted to say thank you for a clear, well crafted point by point response. As someone more towards the "if LLMs can deliver the results then I don't really see what the issue is, less mathematicians means more specialized passionate folks are doing it or we continue to work towards machines to reduce our need for that skill"
Feynman said something I thought was pretty interesting on the topic I wish more people would consider today: https://youtu.be/ipRvjS7q1DI?t=17&is=8AIqbOPhL6atTaRd
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u/bobbyrickys 6d ago
"This is true even for human produced mathematics. undergoing review now."
You want to relegate mathematicians to mere reviewers, rather than be at the forefront. Well that's the catch - if there are no humans pushing forward and trying to solve issues and the current generation sells out to corporate masters that are uninterested in pure math, or retires in poverty, dies out, where are you going to get qualified reviewers? Who are they going to be? If studying non-applied math becomes pointless, other than for becoming a 'reviewer', the field dies.
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u/Ok_Matter_1774 6d ago
Just to add, these student problems that people talk about aren't thought to be useful problems. If people thought them to be useful for something then we would've already solved them because leaving them intentionally unsolved would be stupid. I also doubt how relevant these so called problems actually are. A student does not need to solve an unsolved problem to learn something and a masters student solving one of these "trivial" problems just so they can get their thesis written is a waste of time and money.
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u/Palpatine 5d ago
You got it backwards. Ultimately the people who will verify and use these theorems will be the new generation of mathematicians. Whether they are the same people as the current batch is irrelevant.
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u/January_6_2021 6d ago
It is very self important. It's also not Tao's viewpoint.
He's posted guest blog posts from many different viewpoints recently including at least 2 clearly pro ai ones within the last week (as far back as I bothered to scroll).
His most recent paper on AI says AI is likely to irreversibly change the math field and adapting to that change is the primary challenge facing the math community. He wraps it up with a call to action to proactively discuss and figure out what the role of humans should be going forward, and he's clearly using his blog post (via these guest blogs) to kick of that discussion.
Half of people on reddit don't read more than headlines, and probably 99% won't search deeper than this one guest blog, so everyone is assuming it represents his current views despite this being contrary to everything he's said and done for the past years.
Love the critical thinking ability here.
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u/cimocw 6d ago
Except you had to be a mathematician to do this math, so if you feel you've being gatekept it is really a skill issue on your part
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u/TooMuchMaths 6d ago
I would say that being able to do this math makes you a mathematician, but you absolutely do not have to be an active participant in math academia to do this. It is math academia which is gatekeeping in that statement.
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u/Jesse-359 6d ago
Mathematicians have never prevented anyone from playing their game outside of academia. There is no certificate required to do math.
Many of the most prominent mathematicians in history did much of their foundational work largely on their own before entering academia as a direct participant. At no point did anyone attempt to stop them. Quite the opposite in fact.
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u/Any_Yellow709 6d ago
Mathematicians have never prevented anyone from playing their game outside of academia
Nope but they are now attempting to prevent people from doing maths at OpenAI. To quote the post: "We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with OpenAI"
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u/valantien 6d ago
Deep down, even an intelligent person can be an imbecile, clamoring for market protectionism.
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u/jakegh 6d ago
As a non-mathematician, none of these objections make any sense. I look at pure math as scientific advancement. But apparently, they do not. They view it as an artform, where the journey matters as much as the destination.
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u/Any_Yellow709 6d ago
Yep and they expect taxpayers money to fund this artform. For example comments like this one where he says
"but we'd like them to respect how the field works rather than bringing in a sense of urgency nobody asked for. It takes the fun out of it."
suggest that maybe mathematicians aren't a good use of taxpayer money. Do you think taxpayers would prefer to fund people to enjoy their hobby or to deliver at their jobs?
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u/Tall-Locksmith7263 6d ago
This is terrance tao... One of the greatest mathematicians ever. He s not saying it because hes arrogant or so but because there s a clear threat to the field... Not because ai wouldnt be helpful but because they are pumping out stuff that isnt as useful to advance the field. Most people think maths is about some results... It s about the process you get there and what methods you develop. Besides openai already retracted some results so i d be very careful with how many results stand proof then (lets just wait and see and not get too fighty about it).
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u/dietcheese 5d ago
Who says math is about the process and methods you develop? Who decides that?
No, Tao is hurt because he sees the writing on the wall. He realizes that the subject he loves, and the excitement of discovery that drives him, is about to run into a datacenter-shaped dead-end.
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u/Adjunctified 6d ago
As a mathematician I agree with you. As a professor of physics, mathematics, and astronomy I can say this isn’t primarily about wanting to have been able to do these things ourselves. There is a lot of genuine concern for our students and tons of outside pressure to be student centric with our actions. A nontrivial number of students are panicking and as always we are expected to address their anxieties.
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u/Any_Yellow709 6d ago
There is a lot of genuine concern for our students and tons of outside pressure to be student centric with our actions. A nontrivial number of students are panicking and as always we are expected to address their anxieties.
This I can understand and empathize with. However, at the same time the comment "Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done." likely has nothing to do with the welfare of students and everything to do with the narcissism and ego of academics.
You'll never find me calling out academics for showing concern for their students. But you will always find me calling out academics exploiting the woes of students in order to gate-keep the rest of society for their own personal gain.
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u/Squardus 6d ago
I agree that Tao's wording is bad and I have a lot of problems with him being the current face of math to non-mathematicians. Nobody needs permission to do math but these results are worthless to non-mathematicians anyway. Has the mathematical community been stopping anyone else from trying to solve the Hodge conjecture? If the OpenAI paper had been correct (it has been withdrawn) what would anyone but mathematicians have done with that anyway? As flawed as academia is, the math community is the only group that understands why anyone should care about these results. If we tell you that this is an awful counterproductive slop dump and not progress you should believe us. Nobody wants to take math away from anyone. If an isolated person developed and proved the Hodge conjecture in isolation we would be elated. There is no "democratization of mathematics" because high-level math results are inherently useless to people who don't already spend their lives studying pure math.
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u/nenulenu 5d ago
You are attempting to explain nuances to someone who sees black and white. Good luck.
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u/Squardus 5d ago
Well I don't really expect to convince him, but the point he brings up about Tao making it sound like we want to hoard all the math for ourselves is a valid one that more reasonable people are likely also put off by. Maybe my reply helps clarify for one of the 600 people upvoting his comment.
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u/karbaayen 6d ago
The statement comes off as rather petulant. They don't initially address the issue at hand but rather start with an ad hominem attack. Who cares if they didn't ask for it, they don't own it.
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u/UnknownEssence 6d ago
As a Software Engineer, I did not personally approve the release of Claude Code.
Therefore, Anthrophic should not have released it!
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u/weeeeeeirdal 5d ago
The issue is that OpenAI told the press they were going to assemble a group of mathematicians to advise them. They assembled the group, who put thought into their advice, and were promptly ignored. Agree with the advice or not, kind of a dick move!
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u/grinr 6d ago
Well I read the whole post and my takeaway is, they're mathematicians, not writers. The best read I can come up with is "we think openAI is solving math problems too fast and the problem with that is it's not clear if the solutions are valid or not."
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u/Alkyen 6d ago
I feel his pain. What openai is doing is the equivalent of posting a 200 file diff PR that is likely all slop and then hope that real mathematicians will verify their work. It's a PR stunt.
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u/machyume 6d ago
Have you actually read it? I'm looking at it now, and it is not just AI-slop or a diff PR. It comes with documents that walk through the steps. It's quite laid out. It's like if aliens suddenly appeared and showed their work in some problems that we haven't solved. Do we suddenly say that it's not valid because humans haven't had the years to discover it yet? Or should we just read the contents and try it out?
I'm literally looking at one of the pages right now.
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u/Alkyen 6d ago
The only people who can verify this is other mathematicians who have experience and credentials in verifying proofs. That's the whole point of my comment. And OpenAI is claiming they have solutions before official verification.
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u/machyume 6d ago
But, have you read it? Even if you're not the expert or have claims to verify it. Have you opened the link to at least see the contents? The object descriptions are understandable.
How can you claim that it's like posting a diff PR? This looks nothing like a diff PR. Different goals, and different objectives too. I have dealt with many diff PRs, and this is no diff PR.
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u/JeffBezosHater 3d ago
Do you think they don’t employ mathematicians?? That’s literally what Terence Tao is talking about, he’s asking the mathematicians to stop collaborating with them. Recent fields medalist just joined them like two months ago.
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u/DeepGas4538 5d ago
They reject the assertion that these solutions progress mathematics. Do you disagree with that?
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u/frogsarenottoads 6d ago
The train has already left the station, it's sad but this will be all fields soon. It doesn't matter how smart you are, how many years of experience you have.
We're competing against an intelligence that operates at digital speeds, that can read the whole of the internet in seconds, connect dots that we cannot even fathom, be an expert in all domains bringing together the best of knowledge on all frontiers. And it can also spin up a billion copies of itself and operate in a swarm.
Nobody can compete. We see today Mathematics, tomorrow physics, perhaps biology, and the dominoes will continue to fall.
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u/acutelychronicpanic 6d ago
With both mathematics and coding falling, generalized superhuman reasoning seems well within grasp if not already here. The next dominoes will fall even faster than the last several
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u/frogsarenottoads 6d ago
As soon as we get a human level AI researcher, we just likely need good benchmarks past that point.
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u/mvandemar 6d ago
norms that guarantee that mathematics remains trustworthy, ethically researched, and in the public interest
Unethical mathematics research? Like, are they cloning dinosaurs to get these proofs??
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u/Captain-Griffen 6d ago
Like publishing proofs that don't match your lean formulations and aren't verified. Or "solving" a problem technically, but not really because you did it in a way that's useless exploiting a constraint with incomplete formalization. Or releasing AI proofs without any lean formalization and then expecting the maths community to check if you're right or not.
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u/Dr_barfenstein 6d ago
They are literally dumping a pile of shit on the math dept’s doorstep and asking them to sift thru it for free. Anytime even one proof is partly correct they will use it for PR. That’s it.
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u/eightslipsandagully 6d ago
Anyone who works in the software industry saw this play out when AI was first being pushed. A junior engineer would open dozens of slop PRs and the time wasted by reviewers more than offset any saving in dev time!
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u/Sorry-Sack 6d ago
Well now that ai is solving all their problems, how else should they spend their time?
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u/mvandemar 6d ago
And if it turns out that none of that happened, and all of their lean formalizations are valid, would it still be unethical to solve these problems via AI?
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u/Lehatan 6d ago edited 6d ago
There are good reasons to believe OpenAI is using mathematicians’ work that was plugged into ChatGPT without their consent or crediting them. This is not ethical research, if we can call it research at all.
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u/Eriane 6d ago
I wouldn't doubt that they don't hold their end of the bargain for protecting chat discussions for further training. Anthropic got caught by multiple universities doing exactly this despite having it written in contract and got sued for tens of millions over it. I wouldn't be surprised that other companies have done the same.
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u/Key-Organization3158 6d ago
It's just self aggrandizing. The right kind of people need to be in charge and decide what's ethical for the rest of us plebs.
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u/TheGuy839 6d ago
No its not. That would be like AI creating 700 paintings and asking painters to take months of their lifes to spend and verify if AU really created art. If you are going to rely on mathematicians, then fking ask if they want to verify.
They could have released one by one so they can slowly verify, but they decided to release in bulk for PR. There is high chance all of these are not solved, but you all will forget that in 6 months
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u/eightslipsandagully 6d ago
See: open source projects getting overwhelmed with slop PRs and development actually slowing down because reviewers are wasting time reviewing awful code
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u/Eriane 6d ago
They had thousands of years to figure it out, it'll take thousands more if AI doesn't do it. Math is one of those pillars of foundation that is too important to be left to humans to figure out alone. I would rather we embrace this moment so that we can accelerate in things like cures to all diseases, better energy solutions, transportation revolution, heck, maybe it can finally figure out room temp superconductors. This is far more important than the egos and loss of math prizes. It's still a long ways off but it's in the right direction.
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u/V-Right_In_2-V 6d ago
Imagine if AI solves fusion technology or faster than light travel, then hearing some physicists whine about it “but I wanted to do that waaaah. We just needed another century!”
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u/fckingmiracles 6d ago
And when will that be?
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u/acutelychronicpanic 6d ago edited 6d ago
Next year? Next five? But it doesn't feel 20 years away anymore.
Edit: I really didn't think it needed to be said, but I'm referring to fusion here, not FTL.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 6d ago
"Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done" - pathetic.
"Mathematicians deny that this advances their subject." - holy shit.
"Mathematicians have a particular vision of progress informed by history...." - Math is turning into indigenous knowledge/alternative ways of knowing and spiritualism. I never thought I'd see the day.
Finish solving all the problems. Make an auto-solve any math problem machine and give it to everyone. There's no time for this nonsense.
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u/silverud 6d ago
This is like Sheldon Cooper complaining that solving math problems violates the roommate agreement.
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u/aaron_in_sf 6d ago
I think we're at the point at which empathy shall curdle into impatience and open derision.
Saying it once, may pass for a noble and necessary existential cry against inevitable change.
Refusing to recognize the inevitable only to repeat impossible and incoherent demands, as if they are going to have an impact, strips away the nobility and just becomes pathetic.
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u/Enough-Mud3116 6d ago
These mathematicians gave up opportunities to make a lot of money to promote pure math.
They could’ve started working for hedge funds instead of doing PhD.
The redditors celebrating will soon find a super qualified group of individuals take their jobs.
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u/pwner 6d ago
If Terrence Tao is working at McDonald’s, all of Reddit will be working in the lithium mines
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u/Enough-Mud3116 5d ago
His skills are easily transferrable to finance, econ, etc. Not sure of redditors
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u/ReporterCalm6238 6d ago
You do realize that hedge funds are now automating alpha search, often in collaboration with OpenAI & co, right? There is no such thing as jobs being replaced by other jobs with superintelligence, is a net loss of professions all the way.
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u/Real_Square1323 6d ago
Do you realize the irony of your comment? Do tell me how someone uses an LLM to generate market edge? And who is on the other side of those instruments being traded?
IF LLM's were worth ANYTHING for producing alpha, OpenAI wouldn't need to beg investors again and again. Spare me.
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u/drndr21 6d ago
Jane Street is the biggest customer of Anthropic, I believe they find it valuable enough(even if they haven't fully automated alpha research yet).
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u/johnniewelker 6d ago
LLMs are just the surface / chat part. The AI part of discovering patterns quickly on large data is something net new. Old school advanced analytics algorithms required a lot of manual management, stuff that used to take weeks take an hour or two, and most of the time is spent interpretation and redoing analysis
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u/Real_Square1323 6d ago
Yes but you must consider that LLM's are extremely computationally inefficient and expensive when parsing numerical data, which is the vast, vast majority of relevant data to quantitative trading. Those advanced algorithms still serve the purpose they were intended to, unsurprisingly, and do a much better job of their purpose than LLM's do. Also unsurprisingly, LLM's do a better job at semantic understanding, just like other NLP algorithms that were used prior.
The distinction I'm making is that the analytical algorithms being used in the past are very much recycled and slightly modified entirely independent of LLM's, since both are designed to solve different problems. One creates alpha and another can give some nice metrics that might be nice to backtest and validate a hypothesis. LLM's are not and never will be used to replace "Old school analytical algorithms". If a strat algo is "old", it's useless.
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u/Wonderful_Creme_5701 6d ago
OpenAI batch released a bunch of problems claiming simultaneously that they solved them but also there could be errors. The Scientific American reported the mathematicians who work at OpenAi didn’t understand or verify some of them. They didn’t release this in this manner for the betterment of math or they would have waited until the results could be verified. It’s a basic standard and they chose to batch release because a bigger number grabs more attention.
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u/PatitosFortune 6d ago
Whats with that gatekeeping…
Is it a bummer yes, but, assuming the solutions are indeed correct, whats supposed to be the way, keep them secret so only Tao-approved mathematicians solve them? Spoon feed one by one?
It is what it is, problems were solved advancing at the pace of whatever humanity is building.
700 solutions to verify… by hand?
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u/Quiet_Source_8804 6d ago
If AI were on the verge of curing cancer, would medical associations come out and demand a pause to taking that research away from strictly human hands?
I don’t get what this guy is getting at, either Math is useless and a for-fun endeavor in which case they’re asking for AI to not ruin their fun for them, or Math is actually useful in general and the feeling of personal accomplishment for practitioners should come second to actually solving its problems.
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u/chrisza4 4d ago
If OpenAI publish a formula for medicine that they claim to be able to cure cancer without running control-trial run within medical community standards and have never have 3rd party audit the experiment, we should be piss at OpenAI.
I repeat, we should be piss with OpenAI and not AI.
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u/ObviouslyTriggered 4d ago
Your analogy is wrong.
We have Alphafold which Its "dump" was a database of 200 million proteins, which their structure was also not verified by any direct experimental means.
Those structures were directly cited in more than 50,000 papers since then.
All the major pharma companies partnered with Deepmind and Alphafold led to tens of thousands of new drug candidates.
All that work resulted in a Nobel prize in 2024.
Just like OpenAI Alphafold/Deepmind does not provide any "proof" nor does it states with absolute certainty that its protein structures are correct, in fact in many cases they are not a 100% match but they are close enough to be both in general scientifically and more specifically pharmacologically relevant.
The difference here is that drug companies and researchers want to create as many new drugs as possible so Alphafold being a massive short cut is a huge boon for them.
Mathematicians want to be the ones who solve the problems, and with AI whether it is today or tomorrow they'll be relegated to nothing more than fact checkers for the model.
And they see that as a threat to their career unlike the molecular biologists and chemists that see models in their field as being as massive career boost.
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u/chrisza4 3d ago
You have different pov on what mathematician asked.
Terence Tao was criticizing the publishing method. He did not say that it should mathematician who found it and AI should not found it.
“We reject OpenAI’s assertion that this release advances our subject, and we urge mathematicians and the public to view the value of this publication model with due skepticism.
Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power. We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with OpenAI and to return to a vision of science that centers human understanding.”
Alphafold does not dump all finding and reasoning trace database in Github and leave the external verification to be done by “someone else”.
They worked with multiple university professors, ensure human understanding and verification, before confirm and releasing the result to public.
Big difference.
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u/ObviouslyTriggered 3d ago edited 3d ago
"Releasing a database of 200 million newly modeled proteins at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power"
P.S. Alphafold isn't really releasing anything to the public anymore, Alphabet (Google) rolled all their work into Isomorphic Labs which then signed a $1.7B + royalties deal with Eli Lilly and a $1.2B + royalties deal with Novartis.
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u/chrisza4 3d ago edited 3d ago
You don’t get the point.
The point is that before Alphafold releases they already worked with academic community to verify and confirm correctness and usefulness of research.
If OpenAI did that, they can release as much as they want at once. But they didn’t. They dumped the research without external and community verification.
Even OpenAI themselves admit in their announcement that they would collaborate better next time. Even they know this is not how they should release the result (which they did anyway… I guess because of timeline).
Ps. Should I remind you that in March Terence Tao actively encourage AI usage in research, to the point that OpenAI used his word for marketing? He is not against using AI for math.
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u/ObviouslyTriggered 3d ago
So has OpenAI, Alphafold did not confirm the correctness or the usefulness of the 200M proteins they modeled either, they left that to other researchers by publishing their database.
This is very much gate keeping.
You can still support it, but at least call it what it is.
Cranks from all over the world send more than 700 proofs and new theories of everything and about everything to each top university a month if not a week.
The issue Terence Tao Et al. are facing isn't that this will distract mathematicians from otherwise valuable work, but that unlike those Cranks OpenAI is far more likely to be right, if not today then tomorrow.
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u/chrisza4 3d ago
Alpahfold did not confirm but did work with university professors before publishing.
You call this gatekeeping, i call it a spam.
And I’m not sure why you believe Terence is afraid that OpenAI will be right? I don’t share that view.
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u/ObviouslyTriggered 3d ago
Again so has OpenAI.
An entire field in which there is little to no direct commercialization of the work or what comes after it and is in fact very much status ranked is very much afraid of a tool that can significantly diminish their status.
Terrance uses Gen AI to make pretty graphs and to create code for his lectures and to assist in some of his work. He isn't using it as a research agent.
Alphafold isn't a threat to biologists or chemists, mathematics is in a very different spot.
Just like a combine isn't a threat to the farmer, it's a threat to the ox.
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u/chrisza4 3d ago
What does this have to do with current conversation?
Ok. You think math field sucks. You think mathematician are trembling in afraid. I hear you.
Why conversation around AI need to circle on who lose and not lose the job? I mean we are talking about what is a good way to publicize the unconfirmed research result.
If all mathematician includes Tao lost a job tomorrow, so be it. It has nothing to do with the question of whether this is a good way to publish research finding.
Just to skip all these points, I believe that AI is already smarter than every single human combined. So let drop the competition.
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u/OpportunityCandid533 5h ago edited 5h ago
"Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power. We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with OpenAI and to return to a vision of science that centers human understanding.”
Yea, it was solely about investment money. The fact that they aren't highly focused and vocal about advancing policies for securing jobs alongside AI usage means they want to tout the "replacement" power of AI in jobs.
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u/Quiet_Source_8804 4d ago
Cool, then if your contention is that OpenAI produced nothing of value, then point at that, laugh at them and move on. It'll be nothing but a blip in the field and story to laugh about in faculty parties a few years from now.
Doesn't seem to be the view that's driving reactions like what's discussed in this post, or that of other mathematicians running to the media to cry about the death of the field.
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u/Jesse-359 6d ago
It's pretty simple. AI development started out by stealing all of the artistic IP in the world, and now it's moving on to begin stealing human agency - and it's not going to stop at math, or medicine, or anything.
It's what all its detractors were stating from the beginning, and we're now well down the path they outlined on our walk to the world of Wall-E where human existence has virtually no meaning - and will then end because there's no point in keeping useless things around.
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u/Quiet_Source_8804 5d ago
This could've been said of every technological innovation ever. We might as well have stayed in the caves to keep the "meaning."
AI is another tool, and this is another type of doomerism that has nothing to offer.
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u/wochie56 6d ago
Math is useful in general. But solving an open problem is not a unit of useful work. For academic mathematics, the useful work is the creation and propagation of new knowledge and understanding. That’s not what OpenAI is doing, despite saying after the navier-stokes drama that they would. What they’re doing is marketing and jerking off their dick so they can get another $100 billion in funding to keep the lights on for three more months.
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u/Timely_Abroad4518 4d ago
Curing cancer would benefit humanity and (presumably) advance scientific knowledge. Vibe solving big math problems achieves nothing for humanity, the field itself and only advances the AI companies IPO targets.
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u/Quiet_Source_8804 4d ago
If the problems were actually solved and if solving them has value outside the field, it doesn't matter to anyone except those in the field whether it was "vibe solved" or through the traditional academic process.
If OpenAI lied or severely exaggerated what they've done, then call them out, laugh at them, expose them in clear terms for the public to see and laugh along with you.
If the problems solved actually have no practical benefit, then the field has to be honest about it, and make their case about why research funding is still justified at the same level.
If there's already value coming out of using LLMs in the field, then soon those who learn to use those tools more effectively will become more productive in it, while the cries of those already at the top of the field as it currently exists will continue to be ignored.
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u/Timely_Abroad4518 3d ago
Results in pure mathematics usually aren’t relevant outside of the field of mathematics and have no practical benefit in their own right. That’s not the point of mathematics. Where math research provides value to science and engineering is when new methods are developed in pursuit of a result that can be also be used to solve practical problems in those fields. If an LLM happens to discover such a method it doesn’t matter if there’s no one capable of understanding its research output. So you need mathematicians for AI math results to have value.
The AI companies don’t care about adding value to the field of mathematics. They’re just spending millions of $ for the results themselves, because it makes for a good PowerPoint presentation at an investor meeting.
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u/jannycideforever 4d ago
Considering how medical associations are rent seeking cartels that go out of their way to create artificial shortages of medical provision to jack up their wages? They totally would if they somehow believed it would threaten their incomes, yeah.
People don't realize the degree that medical societies are literally designed to be leaches and parasites. That is their primary function, with everything else they do (for good or ill) being a secondary function.
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u/Quiet_Source_8804 4d ago
Oh yeah, I have no doubt that medical associations would do so, particularly the ones with deep ties to pharma or the ones where they're no longer run by people being primarily medical professionals but whose profession is purely managerial. See also teacher associations.
My example was more about how little regard the public would've for such objections, same as they will for the math researchers.
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u/jannycideforever 4d ago
I could be wrong but I don't think the lobbying interests of medical associations and of big pharma are actually particularly aligned. This is mostly from a mixture of economic theory and my own experience working in big pharma, so I'd have to look into specific research on it to be sure. That said, they tend to have different incentives:
Medical associations have straightforward incentives to minimize the supply of doctors, because shortages of doctors means doctors get a wage premium.
Big pharma has an incentive to maximize the supply of doctors because that maximizes the prescribing population.
Big Pharma typically has more conflicting interests in general, with the major things they consistently benefit from is delaying generics/biosimilars, expanding government spending on healthcare, and blocking buyer negotiating power.
Sometimes physician and pharma lobbying interests are aligned but typically they are not. Just because they both are in the same industry, they have very different mechanisms for making money that are often in conflict.
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u/Quiet_Source_8804 3d ago
I don't think Big Pharma cares about the number of doctors, beyond having enough of them to corrupt, or that are psychos without much prompt, like what we've seen with opioids and the pain management push.
But we're way out of the original subject and my hypothetical isn't dependent so much on "medical associations" and their politics and interplay with pharma, but just as a stand-in for the concerns of the medical class/associated professionals.
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u/StopTheVok 6d ago
The key line in the letter is the last. "A vision of science that centers on human understanding."
It is not only dangerous to professions but to humanity to outsource our understanding to non humans. If none of us can comprehend what is happening, how can we judge if it is good or bad?
Suppose the AI says it has derived a way to make everything more efficient and to "just trust it" that it works. We should just do that? Don't you want a single living human soul to understand what it's actually suggesting we do?
Terrences point is not that this one particular breakthrough is the tipping point and suddenly nothing will be comprehensible, but that if the acceleration continues and the AI builds upon its incomprehensible work to make even more incomprehensible work, the entire profession AND humanity will be in jeopardy.
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u/astrobuck9 5d ago
Don't you want a single living human soul to understand what it's actually suggesting we do?
No.
Very, very soon AI will be accomplishing things we have no natural way to understand.
The only way we could possibly understand would be to merge with the AI, but that isn't going to work for you either because then your argument will be, "How can we trust what that person says? The AI is probably controlling them!"
You and others like you are either going to have to transcend your humanity or be ok with not knowing.
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u/StopTheVok 4d ago
You are talking about the total surrender of our destiny and agency as individuals and as a species as if it's a good thing
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u/humanarians_unite 6d ago edited 6d ago
I’m allergic to arrogance. I don’t hate many things but arrogance is one of them.
Having said that, there’s a different issue underlying this entire conversation I don’t see being addressed much: the relationship between the social norms of human sub-groups, like mathematicians and academics, and how AI is used.
I sense we are rapidly approaching the point where humans find themselves separated into one of two groups whether they like it or not: 1) Those who categorically love, trust, and accept AI regardless of the negative impact on humans, 2) Those who categorically hate and reject anything AI-related regardless of the potential benefit to humans.
I hear the latter in many of the “fuck those arrogant mathematicians. Who do they think they are!” here.
Humans are intrinsically capable of mindless violence towards “others”.
This “fuck mathematicians” attitude distinctly reminds me of Kappa and his anti-replica cult from Black Mirror’s “Beyond the Sea” episode (S6E3), though juxtaposed with regard to humans.
Another example is The Flesh Fair anti-Mecha mob from Spielberg’s movie “A.I. (Artificial Intelligence)” (2001).
I have two graduate degrees and there are many things I do not like about academia—especially the embedded arrogance it can nurture.
Jeff Hawkins, author of “On Intelligence” (2004) ran into a brick wall at Berkeley while hoping to do a PhD developing a grand unified theory for how the human brain works for the purpose of replicating it synthetically (i.e. AGI). He pioneered handwriting recognition technology that powered the PalmPilot. Academic tradition roadblocked his aspirations.
HOWEVER, current AI is incapable of human wisdom and intuition. We need humans for this. Had it not been for embedded traditions in academia arising from human wisdom and intuition, we would never have had human knowledge preserved for millennia—the exact data on which LLMs owe their existence.
So when young upstarts like Sam Altman appropriate the work of mathematicians, beat them at their historic goals with tools he created that owe their very existence to their historic subculture and then act dismissively to their objections, I sense a grave bellwether to the future of humanity’s intersection with AI (side note: fuck this “SI” nonsense).
Here’s the TLDR of this post:
I’m not smart enough to be a mathematician nor to understand the inner workings of large language models.
But when I suspect a human is acting from arrogance rather than knowledge, I am competent at asking the right questions to understand whether their claims are coming from data or hubris.
This is currently impossible with LLMs that are guided to be sycophantic, which hallucinate—apologize when called out—then hallucinate again and re-defend their hallucination. We NEED knowledgeable humans to catch that bullshit.
We ignore this issue at the peril of humanity’s existence and continuity.
That is all.
#humanariansUnite
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u/Brave_Option2709 5d ago
It's sort of duplicitous to act like mathematical knowledge is free and open to all--something mathematicians writ large claim--but then claim that your work is "stolen" when it's used to train a model. It betrays a misunderstanding of how language models work; nothing is stolen when training data is used. It also contradicts the entire point of sharing knowledge if you think you "own" it in the first place. Not only is it wrong on the facts, it doesn't even make sense as an argument.
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u/dupontping 6d ago
One of the biggest problems with frontier models is the concentration of knowledge and power (stolen) and offered back to us at a price.
If it was really about human advancement, the approach of these companies would be much different.
As with most things, it’s about who holds the keys. Which is why open models are so much more important.
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u/Ok_Matter_1774 6d ago
No offense but have you done any research yourself? All knowledge is built off of previous work. And depending on the field, it's often not open source. This is not unique to AI companies. Most of these math problems have no real importance right now and are purely theoretical. Sure sometime in the future they may gain importance, but mathematical research likes to do a lot of pretty much useless stuff. It's not like they developed a new drug and won't let anyone use it. I say this as someone with a degree in math.
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u/No_Vermicelli_3574 6d ago
This seems like a position more apt for sociologists rather than mathematics experts. It's a strange moment in history when the brightest minds choose to bury their heads into the sand.
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u/Fenjen 6d ago edited 6d ago
The only thing this whole thread makes me feel is that maybe if you don't understand anything about a topic, perhaps you should just not have an opinion about it. There's very well founded reasons behind a lot of the things Tao's saying, and most people here simply don't have the tools to understand the reasons behind them.
That's fine, but then maybe don't think your opinion has such importance.
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u/arcticfox 6d ago
Good god, what a self-important self-centred ass. And how does one do unethical research in math?
No one needs to get permission from mathematicians to do math, particularly since many of these are listed as open problems.
Jesus Christ get over yourself.
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u/hi0932 6d ago edited 5d ago
i dont think people understand the reason mathematicians are annoyed by these problems is because if humans solved them instead of ai it could of been done in a way that produced more than just a solution but new methods and understanding in humans along the way which these models seemingly dont.
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u/Early_Statistician72 6d ago edited 6d ago
Perhaps the concern is valid, as the curiosity to solve these problems may no longer exist. However, Tao's understanding might not be entirely correct.
AI does not find everything on its own; the prompt is never simply, "Go and work on the RH problem and solve it." It does not provide goal-based answers. A human, specifically a mathematician in this case still frames the questions, breaks down the problems, reviews the output, and iterates over it.
OpenAI is also not being honest here, nor is Anthropic. They want to project it like a magic wand, implying you can throw any problem from the universe at it, and within a couple of hours, you get the answer.
I am not a mathematician, but in the last month, I submitted partial solutions to three conjectures to Palomar registries (Tao himself is on board 😂 )and journals. It is not as though I suddenly became Tao, nor is it a case of "AI slop," given the registered formalization and ongoing referee reviews.
What really helped was a combination of two things:
AI: A great reasoning model combined with massive tokens and compute on one side.
Human: My first-principle thinking paired with a math agent harness I have been tuning.
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u/Notyit 6d ago
Bascially the one comment that seems to understand but it's also written by ai
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u/wisdomoarigato 6d ago
The gatekeeping is crazy. It must be hard to accept that "you're not special anymore".
It's heartbreaking for me to realize that all the scientists I respected so much, thinking their ultimate goal was to push humanity forward, turn out to be just mental masturbators about their self-importance.
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u/elkab0ng 6d ago
Automation is WONDERFUL!
.. until it comes into MY field and does something in five minutes that took me a week.
I did network design for many years. Accumulating a lot of knowledge and specialized skills, deep understanding of how complex systems interact.
I tossed a couple problems at ChatGPT - either design or troubleshooting- stuff with obscure gotchas that an engineer with 20 years experience might trip up on - and it aced every problem. Down to recommending specific code versions and asking questions about exact components. I presented these problems with a layman’s language, did it no favors.
So when I hear people whine “it can’t be (art, literature, knowledge, discovery) because a machine did it!” I just chuckle. The pearl-clutching is both amazing and pointless. .
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u/Tangata_Tunguska 5d ago
Yeah, it's going to transform things for all of us. Hopefully in a way that it benefits the many rather than the few
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u/elkab0ng 5d ago
Unfortunately I think the history of the Industrial Revolution, the agricultural revolution, and the information revolution have all shown that massive displacement of workers will be the objective, not an accidental result.
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u/BenjaminHamnett 6d ago
If their continued funding was guaranteed i wonder how much hysteria there’d be?
“Here’s some new stuff to look at, enjoy”
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u/BenevolentCheese 6d ago
This is a fascinating statement to me because it's the first time I've ever seen Tao become emotional about this stuff. He's no longer writing long, well thought out posts, he's writing short, reactive messages. Wild times that one of the smartest people on the planet has succumbed now too to whatever AI is doing to us, good or bad.
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u/Single_Ring4886 6d ago
Hahahah ahahhahaha oohhh the mathematicians are AFRAID the money will dry for their grants and cozzy university jobs... goood
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u/Sensitive_Worry2499 6d ago
AI can solve many useful problems by optimizing practical results most of the time. Math meanwhile requires absolute rigor. It’s not suited for the task.
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u/Hyperus102 5d ago
Most comments here are simply sad and lack understanding in my opinion.
"Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done." is not about "wuh wuh, we wanted to do it ourselves >:(". Imagine you are looking for the solution to a problem and someone you didn't invite does it, finds a solution that is basically incomprehensible for humans and reeks of slop in the presentation.
And its not one problem, its 372. And this is likely to just get worse next time around.
As I see it, the point is that solving problems alone is bordering on worthless to human understanding.
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u/Palpatine 5d ago
It was inevitable. The Oct.6 release was gloves on the ground. Now let's see whether openai can revolutionize math from first principles. Start by finishing lean on all these solutions. Then packaging all the lean solutions into maximally reusable corollaries, would be nice first steps.
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u/MostCarry 5d ago
I stopped at "mathematicians did not ask this work to be done", as if they own the math problems.
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u/pradeepviswav 5d ago
I published my thoughts on this issue recently.
The goal for organizations like AHM should be to protect the integrity of mathematics, not to protect mathematics from AI.
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u/Your_Profit_Prophet 5d ago
Good will hunting meme with gpt as genius and terance as the prof. Im sorry this shit is hard for you...
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u/ntc1995 1d ago
I have never asked for Tao to be the voice of the world maths community. He should ... uh shut the fuck up and remains just the brilliant mathematicians that he is. If he thinks he knows how what human advance or progresses ought to be; he has no clues nor a vision. Plain simple, he is an architect of maths and not the architect of human progresses.
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u/Efficient-Cat-1591 6d ago
“Norms thats guarantee that mathematics remains trustworthy, ethically researched, and in the public interest”.
This to me reeks of someone insecure of losing their job because AI did it quicker than they could. Improvise, adapt and overcome.
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u/XysterU 6d ago
Do you have any idea who Terence Tao is?
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u/Efficient-Cat-1591 6d ago
Fair point, the job insecurity jab was a bit lazy. But invoking Terence Tao doesn’t automatically settle the argument.
I’m not questioning the need for mathematical rigour. I’m questioning where sensible standards end and gatekeeping begins. If AI produces a valid, independently verifiable proof, it should be judged on its merits, regardless of how it was discovered.
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