Mathematicians Feeling Undermined by AI

“No it’s actually shit right now, and what he’s talking about is the solution, needed now.Seriously if you code, do a Codex (or whatever) project in a language and framework you know nothing about just using AI, no coding. It wows at first but starts diverging more and more from your mental model, until small requests require complete redesign each time and it starts breaking. In other words it happily diverges from human representational understanding of the project, to the point you realize you”

“"our work has brought about enormous advancements to the field of mathematics and we don't like it"it's pretty ironic that AI being just a group of mathematical techniques after all is making mathematicians uncomfortable because it works. Instead of reacting like this, mathematicians should be excited to figure out how to use the new tools available and push the frontier of what's possible in service of science.Terrence is asking the stupidest question he could ask: how can math better serve me?”

“> The problem with proprietary models is that you don't get to poke inside and see what it is doing and how it arrives at its answer, which is precisely what mathematicians doUh, a hypothetical fully open source model would have the exact same problem, because LLMs rely on emergent phenomena and no one understands why they work.”

“That’s a false dichotomy.Mathematical progress does (quite obviously, on the whole) help advance humanity, so progress is a good thing. The problem is that defunding mathematicians and handing over control to AI and the companies that create them will cause the subject to stagnate. Sure, for a while we might get progress on existing questions using (perhaps quite novel) combinations of existing techniques, but, so far, given the character of the results we’ve seen, there’s no indication that it”

“Mostly pretty straight forward. The idea that proofs be desloppified, attribute existing literature properly, and published somewhere expediently where it can be commented on, with artifacts for verification, is all very uncontroversial stuff.I think the spicy take is definitely this stance that longstanding mathematical problems shouldn't be used as benchmarks for (specifically proprietary) models. Stated right at the very top.The justification is pretty clear.> The use of proprietary internal”

“We should create a platform where people can upload AI slop proofs anonymously without taking credit for it. That way the incentives of planting a thorem flag would go down. And if someone wants to clean an AI slop proof to advance the field, they can do it without cleaning the house for free of the person that planted the flag.Would OpenAI have uploaded their proof to such a platform? If you know the answer then you know what the problem with what happened is.”

“Math department administrators fire Terence Tao.Based on current reward models, the frontier AI labs will burn down mathematics as an impressive display of capabilities and in doing so, will make it impossible for people that get paid to do mathematics to stay employed.If your job is literally to publish papers, and OpenAI and Anthropic decide that making an infinite-paper-printing machine is the best thing to show how effective their tech is, then as a demo, they destroy that industry.”

“As we know, history is settled by the victors, but stated plainly humanity can not lose to robots or otherwise it is not aligned. Since no such thought was given to the basic mathematics of alignment, the field they are native to, how can we reasonably honor a credit assignment, when they do not meet the basic credit constraint of their own field of study? It would be a failure of mathematics. It's difficult to see how a mathematical achievement could be honored when no regards or considerat”

“> There are vast libraries full of mathematics no one (in this discussion, anyway) has ever heard of that no one reads anymore and has never been applied to anything.And that's an issue why? It would seem to me that producing that also produced the mathematics that revolutionized the world repeatedly for centuries. I would go further and claim that, if you want the mathematics that revolutionizes the world, there's no way to get it without advancing mathematics as a field broadly. Those are not”

“He was an incredibly great man, and it remains a privilege to have learned from him. While I left mathematics for engineering, his audacious asking of the right questions around the philosophical foundations of an endeavor remains a large influence on me and has become a hallmark of my engineering work. It makes me smile that you are familiar with him as well. :)---Here's the full puzzle, as best I remember it:Suppose you have two convex polygons with the following very specific relationship:”