>Maybe mathematics just becomes a little more like other fields--relying on labs with lots of money for compute, digging through a corpus of AI-generated proofs, etc.
Dr. Tao said the same thing. Somehow, this letter came through. He wants to conduct Math competitions where participants who don’t have formal credentials can contribute to mathematical research through AI.
Title: Terence Tao - SAIR Competitions and the Future of Experimental Mathematics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB9YOi3lb7w
and this:
Daniel Litt - Working with LLMs to do high quality math
So he got exuberant because he is funded by SAIR and the "AI for math" fund.
And embarrassingly they used him for a "coal miners should learn math" moment that just benefits the AI industry.
He has severely reversed course in the past week. Without concrete propositions it remains to be seen how much of the new resistance is for show.
I have zero formal math training beyond my Grade 12 Pre-Calculus class. Yet with an LLM I have recently devised an architecture with incredible math potential. Math is a language like any other, and without LLM's I never would have developed the techniques that I have.
AI is a tool. It speaks languages I don't (Math, Science, Code). I would love to participate in a Math competition without a hint of any formal advanced math training because my experience so far tells me I will do well.
‘Incredible math potential’ .. Yeah right, your AI said so ?!
How could you possibly know if it has potential or not? Sounds like AI psychosis setting in.
Because every test I run with it is telling me so? The great thing about math is it can be externally validated.
> Dr. Tao said the same thing.
Apparently he has since changed his mind.
Did he say so somewhere? I don't think these ideas are contradictory. It's just an pro AI tooling but anti-slop stance.
Where is the difference?
He sees value in mathematicians using AI to carefully study mathematics, develop an understanding of both old and new things, and help others understand the new things.
He doesn't see value in scrolling through unsolved problems asking an AI to please solve them. In his view, this is a fundamental confusion about what mathematical research is for. Knocking down unsolved problems without developing the community's understanding of them is like prompting Claude to go through a Jira board, write code for all the open tickets, and then close them without merging or deploying the code.
> He doesn't see value in scrolling through unsolved problems asking an AI to please solve them.
Yet that's exactly how the field works. A new grad student is tasked with finding a suitably difficult problem from a list of unsolved problems. The sweet spot is obscure, so that fewer people are working on it, but not too obscure that no one knows about it. It works the same way in theoretical physics and theoretical Comp Sci, and I speak from insider knowledge. The rosy view of mathematicians in the media is largely a product of marketing.
The authors of the declaration agree with you that this is how the field works today. They think that fact causes AI use to produce bad results, and they want to reformulate how the field works so that AI use will produce good results instead.
The letter addresses this specifically.
Isn’t it more like it merges the code without a dev reviewing or understanding it?
Pretty close, but IMO not quite. A math proof in and of itself is useless unless either:
If you merge and deploy code, you have released a tool that can be used. If you ship a gibberish math proof, it's not useful unless someone else can understand and deploy it to some other means. Now, it's possible AI could understand and make use of the math proofs, even if we can't, which refutes some of my hair splitting :)Not necessarily. That's the best case scenario, but proofs can be intrinsically useful in and of themselves. It's just that for problems of that nature, speculative work is often done ahead of time, e.g. the body of work that already exists assuming the Riemann hypothesis is true.
No. Merged code can perform actions with effects on the world, even if a human being never saw it. Constructing a giant Lean formalization that nobody understands simply doesn't do anything.
taste
"I believe I did, Bob" lives rent free, every time someone tells another person to fuck themselves using technology.
Thank You!
lmao, thank you, i think
Please consider making more comics. You have it.
Yes. I find it really interesting to consider what the machines do and will think of as intrinsically interesting to them. Will they develop their own theories of beauty, mathematical and otherwise?
>Dr. Tao
Professor Tao.