Posted by pred_ 1 day ago
https://mathstodon.xyz/@andreasthom/117240537520615623
https://x.com/ValerioCapraro/status/2097791836269977996, https://xcancel.com/ValerioCapraro/status/209779183626997799...
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ckaz32jwl6t2cno6fmuw2nhn/po...
Model: FB. FB scraped other websites on a massive scale, then spent big on legal lobbying to block others from scraping. FB slurped our address books and spied on our friends. FB bought other companies and mixed the databases. FB made an art & science out of generating "sticky engagement" (they literally acted like trying to addict kids was a worthy "academic" goal, suitable for "serious" investigation thet they consider legitimate "science"). They mastered the cookie and have researched web fingerprinting techniques running 24/7/365.25. Recall that FB recently backdoor-installed a webserver onto every iPhone they could in order to circumvent tracker-blocking.
We aren't just disclosing by chatting. The AI companies now run binaries on all of our computers. They are 1000% non-transparent about everything. They make up new econ-jargon (like "run-rate") to make it seem like they are disclosing. They are constantly doing complex international lobbying and mucking in international relations. They have powerful propaganda/spin centers generating stories, ,manipulative warnings, and misleading info.
This is NOT a comment on AI tech. I like AI, and I support the right of people (programmers) to scrape the open web.
But in short: these are good, old-fashioned tech companies that we have seen over and over ... and over. They are positioned to be the next M$, the next FB (IBM, AOL, lol). Did you follow the latest Steve Balmer news? Do you read Pro Publica?
I get on my knees and PRAY...
We can't trust any of their denials. FB denied everything year after year.
AI regulation needs to start here. Forced interop, forced source code licensing, harsh penalties for privacy violations or conspiracy to access private data. Block lobbying. Etc. These are the kinds of old-fashioned solutions we need for this kind of old-fashioned evil!
We live in a society where phones and internet providers and websites all collect an incredible amount of data about everywhere you go, what you do, and what you think. In the US, we have very few digital rights.
We are building a society where a trillion dollar company can aggregate all this data and just yoink your shiny new idea away from you at the finish line.
This is double plus ungood.
Next step, discussing your Navier Stokes solutions with friends might require leaving your phone in another room.
So for me it sounds quite natural to also share this with AI especially under the privacy assumption. Also there's the assumption of scale -- maybe your problem is not large enough for anyone to care to scoop; and just for blind retraining, how do they know that the proof is even correct to include it into training? I have definitely received a ton of incorrect proofs before. So the SNR of such private chats is also not clear. I'm imagining millions of masters/phd students also trying to solve various random things with various capabilities, but how much real signal is there?
"Its crazy to me that some people are not egotistical, self-centered, and don't solely care about fame and wealth accumulation".
This kind of "they stole from me through AI training!" accusation will soon start being used against other AI users, not necessarily the providers.
All it will take is a mastodon post. And shortly after, we will also see the next iteration of copyright legal trolling.
I think a lot of it is the continuing denial that AI can do anything useful. It can't possibly be that OpenAI's better-than-Astra model is very strong at math; the only way it could have generated a novel proof is by ripping off human work.
since it's openAI who has the evidence (in the form of chain of thoughts, their internal processes, etc etc), it's on them to justify why they're innocent. but they've released nothing at all. we don't even know how hard they tried.
you're being naive
The big claim is that OpenAI sniped the research. Not a model, a human did so. Intentionally. They took someone else's idea and claimed it as their own. This is good old fashioned academic fraud, but with millions in compute resources and corporate incentives thrown at the problem.
Not only did they steal everything from humanity’s knowledge, the theft continues as now we are all hooked up to the machine
I suggest looking at the past history of IP disputes. Humans have been "slurping up and regurgitating ideas" for a very long time. There are lots of examples of parallel creation, rediscovering old ideas independently, telling an idea to the wrong person, and having them claim credit for it.
- Newton/Leibniz clash over who invented calculus. - Niccolò Tartaglia vs. Gerolamo Cardano clash over the formula used to solve cubic equations. This was also an independent rediscovery, as Scipione del Ferro discovered and published the formula earlier. - There are multiple literary works in print, music, and film that have competing claims. - Meccano versus Erector Set: developed about 20 years apart in England and the United States. Unclear if it's independent invention or copied. US developer Alfred Carlton Gilbert claims he was inspired by steel girder construction of infrastructure.
also https://community.thriveglobal.com/10-famous-inventions-that...
So, experts are incentivized to seed LLM data with false-leads to confound it. Already, garbage is being published on arxiv and elsewhere, and many sloppy code-repos too hastening the process. Expert inputs will be in more demand to un-shittify.
I feel that these suspicions of mathematicians "seeding" the models' with intuition on how to solve these problems massively overestimates how much their prompts helped the models, and underestimated how much work the models did.
Why? We are scared of AI being smarter than us, the "human helped the AI" narrative is more psychologically comforting. This line of reasoning will recur a lot over the next few months; we don't want to admit we are no longer the smartest species.
We're scared of big tech companies concentrating ridiculous amounts of power, destroying the communities that support and guide scientific research, without even thinking about the dangers and possible consequences, because a PR stunt is more important in the short term.
Way more often I see
>AI is a scam and steals human insight and doesn't produce anything original
vs
>AI is too capable/powerful and will concentrate power even more than it does already due to its capabilities
The latter is rarer because it requires admitting that AI is useful and inventive
stated more clearly by who? people in social media? I don't know what your feed shows you, but if you focus on what the visible people in the math community is (and have been) saying is precisely what I said.
In this case, it’s much simpler and more human. Largely between two humans — buckmaster and Bubeck. The interesting question is what the role of contribution and credit for research in the ai world.
The capabilities of AI aren’t even in question in this case.