Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

Posted by _alternator_ 16 hours ago

Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI(mathstodon.xyz)

395 points | 349 commentspage 6

devilfileprong 4 hours ago|

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animanoir 13 hours ago||

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johnsmith1840 14 hours ago||

I mean, hasn't it always been this way? If something valuable is within reach and you disclose it, someone else might reach for it?

Just because the length of the arm is longer with an AI org doesn't mean it's somehow fundamentally a different system.

The future is that if you don't use AI your work is a lot easer to reach against someone else who has it.

That dude hand writing code with punchcards can be lapped by a 20yo with python, what's different?

calf 14 hours ago|

The difference is no one writes punchcards so the comparison is inapt. It is more like supposing AI eats everything humans attempt to do. They will take your work as you are working on it, any interaction at all. It is meta-plagiarism, on another level.

johnsmith1840 13 hours ago||

AI didn't "take" anything. An openai researcher did?

The solution is also different to theirs? Literally no evidence of plagarism?

opello 13 hours ago||

No evidence until there's an answer to the question of if prompt data from the other researchers was used to train the internal model.

I think the reasonable ethical question to consider when a company has an incentive to prove its value, and learns of the state of the art of a flashy research topic being close to a solution, and then throws loads of resources at trying to solve it first. I agree that "AI" didn't "take" but it's not an incomprehensible shortcut of criticism of the aforementioned behavior, not that precision should be avoided here.

johnsmith1840 12 hours ago||

Ok so if no plagarism has occured here in any sense then there's no discussion here?

I agree though if they did plagarism it's really really bad for OpenAI. They would instantly have evaporated all remaining good will to gloat over a stolen discovery.

opello 12 hours ago||

I think there's still an ethical question of a business trying to scoop a researcher solely because the business learned of promising progress. It's not a very big leap to consider "multiple discovery" (a la calculus by Leibniz and Newton) and chance that the model that is good at math proofs might have enough ambient context to work faster from a similar knowledge base on the problem for which promising progress was discovered. I think that's not nice at the very least. Surely the above-board way to approach that is "hey researcher, we learned, indirectly, that you might have made significant progress on flashy research topic and would like the chance to throw our vast computational resources in to try to help work toward the conclusion of that effort." But, maybe that's asking too much?

johnsmith1840 11 hours ago||

It's a reasonable take.

I think there's an important part which is that the nature of the beast implies there's effectively zero way to do that.

They have no idea what context, triggering this pathway, was from this guys reddit post 4 years ago.

I also assume that if any AI lab could actually do that it'd be an instant pissing context over who gives who credit the mostest. "This software engineer wrote a sick sorting algorthm everyone now uses, thank you random dude for that training contribution"

Maybe we will in the future, maybe we'll learn that the solution to this prize is from 3 peoples schizo rant on reddit a decade ago. Would be kinda sick actually.

woodgala 14 hours ago||

It sounds like a fancy way of saying kids will forget how to do math if they use calculators. The flattening of the space makes it hard to find new problems deemed significant? Maybe that went over my head, I’ll concede that point.

fwip 14 hours ago|

What? No, it's nothing like that. It means that if you have a critical insight and you share it out loud, somebody with no particular mathematical inclination can just spend lots of money to steal the credit from you.

It shifts power further from the worker toward those with capital.

grog454 13 hours ago|

> We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential.

In other words, the "right" people need to solve it: the mathematicians who made it their job and not the people working to push AI models forward?

Struggling to understand how a solution to a millennium problem like this isn't a net positive. Presumably Open AI employs mathematicians in these efforts anyway. And I can think of far worse uses of the AI compute resources.

xmprt 12 hours ago||

If there are no incentives for mathematicians to work on and share progress in tough problems because they will get scooped, then they will end up quitting and in net we will see less progress overall.

greenowl 12 hours ago||

Mathematicians can join the club like the rest of us.

Time to consider re-training to become a nurse, electrician, auto mechanic, or a plumber.

magicalist 12 hours ago||

> In other words, the "right" people need to solve it: the mathematicians who made it their job and not the people working to push AI models forward?

This is not at all what he said? I'm not sure how you got this from anything he wrote, actually.