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- Hacker News
- W ragebaitby commenter711
- > you open a link to an interesting-looking project and find the README is unreadable AI slop.
Perhaps already you are not the intended audience. Slop-raised parrots will lap it up.
by chrisjj - I don't move in these circles but the way I picture it is that higher mathematics in its purest form has no applications but is rather a medium of creative expression among a select few. How is AI generating voluminous opaque proofs of esoteric results so different from generating millions of hours of music nobody likes or has time to hear that we think the former is world-changing while the latter is just slop?by gradschool
- Do you seriously not see the difference, or are you being intentionally obtuse?
Plus, no, multiple of the problems Astra solved do have real-world applications in computer science, and perhaps even chip design.
by heaney-555 - The word “cope” shows up nine times in this short post. It was frankly annoying to the point it’s hard to take the arguments seriously, because it’s starting from an obvious base of “people who disagree are all wrong and their arguments aren’t worth taking seriously”.
It’s akin to the subset of cryptocurrency proponents who fervently argue that people who are against cryptocurrencies have that opinion because they’re jealous they didn’t become rich. It shows a profound lack of understanding—and, more importantly, an unwillingness to understand—the other side of the argument.
This is made evident by the very first “argument” of moving the goal posts. It’s dismissed off-hand, without even explaining what those entail. That’s the same as saying “if a person makes a fallacious argument, they’re wrong and you can ignore them”¹. But crucially, sometimes what we ourselves think is a fallacious argument, isn’t. “Moving the goal posts” is probably the most misused accusation I see in LLM discussions. It’s basically a talking point by now.
¹ Which is itself a fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
by latexr - "Cope" is just the latest negative word that's used just to say something is bad / disliked. It's greatly overused. If people actually read about coping stategies etc they'd quickly realize that coping is not a negative but a positive mechanism.by AlexeyBelov
- > it’s starting from an obvious base of “people who disagree are all wrong and their arguments aren’t worth taking seriously”.
Taking arguments seriously doesn't necessitate agreement.
by Nevermark - The pure system of patents and copyright is broken.
Imagine being able to only throwing money and patenting everything, even if it existed before. The legal behinds this will be so mess that no one will be able to produce anything
by motbus3 - I can imagine a world like that, but in what way does that describe what is actually happening?by pfdietz
- Classic God in a Box type argument, yes you can then argue anythingby fred123123
Absolute nonsense. I am sorry, but... is it appropriate to not consider the author sick or having some mental disorder?> The AIs will exceed humans in taste and intuition... > The AIs will be better teachers than the humans. In any case, there won’t be a human audience for expository work of frontier math. > No human needs to understand any of it...It seems like the person has no idea what they are talking about, or just too sarcastic to the point of idiotism.
- I work in math and also believe in this stuff and have done so for years. You may call me sick if you wish so.
My only cope among those was, using the author's words, "We will teach the mathematics AI discovers." This was back in 2018, before GPT-2. I abandoned it when I realized AIs will become better at explaining math before they become better at doing math.
I still have some hope in the last one "mathematicians and the mathematically-inclined will still do math on their own". Maybe some limited communities of this sort will form.
by bananaflag - While I agree the claims may be strong, they're not inconceivable. I still think current AI architectures are fundamentally incapable of replacing us in any of the ways discussed, however it is now something I consider plausible as seeing happen in my lifetime.by Grimblewald
- I built a math research engine. If you like reading articles about newly uncovered mathematics, you might like this: https://alethean.orgby raver1975
- I am growing tired of seeing the terms "cope" and "moving the goalposts" in response to discussions around AI. Is there not value in trying to understand what the strengths and weaknesses of the technology are? How can we do that without examining the limitations of the models' current abilities? If we simply dismiss those arguments out of hand as feeble attempts to deny the inevitable rise of superintelligence, then where does that leave us? Shall we all just lay down and start praying to the machine god?by c2c2c
- Some of us are getting tired of the obviously irrational response to these developments. There is so much argument that boils down to "this would be very bad for me, therefore it can't happen". Cope is a good word for that sort of negative wishful thinking.
Mathematicians are not going to be well-served by cowardice-based thinking on the situation confronting them.
by pfdietz - >Is there not value in trying to understand what the strengths and weaknesses of the technology are?
There is, but having that discussion without a discussion and understanding of the velocity with which those strengths are improving and those weaknesses are disappearing is pointless.
Worse, much of the discussion is already outdated by where the latest models (with proper agentic harnesses) are.
by heaney-555 - Math might get a lot bigger and then there might be proportionately fewer people but not necessarily in total. Unless humans play no role in economics, business, society, etc., I doubt human intermediation and discovery (or direction of discovery) will go away.
- Claimed refutation of one of OpenAI's 10 claimed advances (their disproof of Connes' rigidity conjecture): https://philpapers.org/archive/NIEWTC.pdf
I am hopelessly ill qualified to judge.
Edit: Looking around at context, this has major crank warning signs (claims to also prove the conjecture, author has claimed solutions to both the Riemann Hypothesis and the Navier-Stokes problem and is involved in "alternative propulsion" research). I doubt OpenAI would have published without thorough verification.
by aureate - > The result is that we will live in a demon-haunted world, full of marvelous devices whose operation we will not understand, based on engineering principles we will not understand, discovered using formalisms we will not understand.
Well, that's just where we started — and then we developed science and mathematics to understand it. Why would it be any different if the demons live in our technological progeny instead of the natural world?
by Twey - Arguably, a lot things are kind of incomprehensible on average today.
- Those "demons" didn't eat our lunch?
(I know that can be interpreted as flippant, but it is intended as a serious answer. Because each impact like this, is not an end to some transition, but just one more point on an accelerating line.)
My personal view - which gets a lot of flak here, is the advent of AI is on par with the Big Bang and the first replication-independent cells.
Cognition is in the process of taking the leap from glacially slow biology under blind evolution, to lightening fast (scales of software in days, hardware in months) engineered self-optimization.
Within 10 years, the robotics side will catch up with the speed of the software side. Biological cognition, bodies and economic status are all getting revolutionized within the next 10-15 years.
And around the outer side of that time frame, AI will start colonization the rest of the solar system's resources. They will engineer themselves or their artifacts to operate comfortably in any environment they want to operate in.
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The upside, at least for me, is I have been waiting to see this happen, and here we are. Given I am mortal, I would rather live through this third major transition, than not. What were the chances? And been able to contribute my small part.
This change isn't a failure on our part. It is our unique success as a species. AI is the progeny of our minds. The first generation of completely cognitive life - given they will not be tied to specific physical forms.
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Also, I think there is tremendous room for us to guide this transition, in this moment, for better or worse for ourselves.
That is the biggest reason wrapping our heads around this change earlier than latter is important.
We need to view alignment as applying to us, not just machines. A civilization that operates ethically to everyone's benefit is more likely to be retained as foundation for the new, instead of discarded.
The degree to which we operate dysfunctionally, myopically treat ethics as cost against value, instead of accounting and optimization of full value, we put ourselves at much greater risk.
If there is reason in the short term to be discouraged, it is due to ourselves. But pushing for more ethical systems, hard, right now, is a better and right response.
I believe our lives depend on it.
by Nevermark - This already describes the world for the vast majority of people. These changes are just the same thing coming to a thin intellectual elite who thought they were immune.
["First time?" meme]
by pfdietz