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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I get that Tao is a mathematician first and I respect the fact that he stays 'in his wheelhouse' (he didn't write the post but he did post it on his blog). But I think it would be fair to extrapolate and to wonder about this question not just for mathematics but for all of science. Keep in mind that scientific knowledge can be hoarded or used to patent stuff and that there is plenty of evidence that OpenAI, Anthropic and possibly others are going to go after other sources of income[1] than just selling access to their AI inference engines.

I can imagine a future where these companies become the new Zaibatsus[2] holding patents across a wide variety of subject and with mutually re-inforcing silos of proprietary technology created by in-house AI that the rest of the world financed but does not have access to.

[1] For instance: https://www.reuters.com/world/anthropic-quietly-sets-up-biol...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaibatsu

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Intellectual property laws never totally made sense to me in the first place, but they make even less sense in the age of AI.

Who's "intellectual property" are we protecting, exactly, when a machine generates the knowledge?

I hope we can update before it's too late to matter.

See also: Monkey selfie copyright dispute

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

I suppose it's worth distinguishing the type of machine though.

If a genetic algorithm comes up with a unique design and I patent it, that's okay, right?

I think the main issue with LLMs is what went into them. Like we saw recently with Anthropic's revolutionary source control breakthroughs, which turned out to already be in the training data:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094694

> If a genetic algorithm comes up with a unique design and I patent it, that's okay, right?

That depends.

To what degree was your input decisive?

Did you come up with the genetic algorithm?

Is your patent written in a way that it tries to stop others from generating antennas using genetic algorithms?

How would you even write a patent like that?

(The validity of the concept of patents is a separate question, of course.)

Intellectual property laws - like most laws - favor those with a lot of money and that's why you see this asymmetry between say artists, consumers and labels/record companies. The latter simply have far more money and besides they get to optimize their efforts because they are essentially immortal.

AI and AI companies have a similar pathway open to them where they will take a lot of information already out there and then gatekeep the synthesis based on that information (obtained without compensation in most cases) as well as to harvest all of the latent knowledge underneath. This is a bad development in my opinion but I'm sure that their shareholders believe it is great.

This. Maybe AI will help make it clear that strong IP law was never about the starving musician or the heroic author who wrote his award winning novel under candle light. It is about mega property pools that will do anything in their power to maintain that property forever.

It may have started like that though, but it definitely isn't how it is used today.

That is simply not true and just the opinion of people who know nothing about artists.

The same misinformation exists about music agencies, who organize concerts and take a hefty fee.

But those were welcomed by musicians. In the early days (18th century), musicians had to do advertising themselves when traveling to a new city. The innovation was to have an impresario (literally someone who travels ahead of them) to do the organizing.

What musicians don't want is Internet middlemen who pretend to act in their interests and take an even higher cut.

> That is simply not true and just the opinion of people who know nothing about artists.

You seem to be very convinced and yet provided no evidence whatsoever. Here is a source for the opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476

The purpose of intellectual property is to give an incentive to produce new knowledge (and art) by giving the inventor a way to monetize their work. Arguably this does not particularly work; but if you accept the argument then it seems to generalize fairly cleanly to AI. It's giving people an incentive to point their AIs at problems they're familiar with, and do the work to publish a solution for everyone, not just a hacked-up fix for themselves.

If certain inventions become very easy for AI models to discover, i.e. the discovery bound to happen, then in these areas it becomes a game of land grab.

True, but that is plausibly covered by existing precedent: If a discovery is "obvious to one skilled in the art", it can't be patented. IANAL but this seems to me easily extensible to "if you can do it in two five-minute prompts you can't patent it".

Separately, land grabs are not necessarily economically bad. The land being grabbed gets into productive use fast, and the grabber is hardly going to get all the resulting value. Especially not when the monopoly is temporary, as with a patent.

It's already been decided that generated content is not copyrightable

Yes, but the discussion was about patents.

"Knowledge (and art)"... got any examples of patents approved that were llm generated?

Patent laws are a way to avoid trade secrets.

You get protection from the state for making the actual knowledge public but only you are allowed to monetize that knowledge for a period of time.

Arguably the period is far too long, but the concept makes sense.

The alternative is, indeed, trade secrets, where you don’t get state protection if your secret is figured out by someone else (you still cannot steal the secret).

If the AI companies were to hoard knowledge they could also do it though trade secrets and not patents.

> Arguably the period is far too long, but the concept makes sense.

The system is too vulnerable to regulatory capture.

Lobbying others being banned from using AI for this kind of stuff due to bioterrorism etc is an excellent anticompetitive move.

Good thing we have open source models from China, famous for ignoring copyright...

Whereas OpenAI and Anthropic…

Or even, a golden age or a dark age for human society?

I mean, a society devoted to enriching all humans in multiple ways will want mathematicians. A society that aims to just suck all the value it can out of a given human wouldn't need and so wouldn't have mathematicians, if the answers they give can be provided by a machine.

Do we not see a path forward where the humans are further informed, don't need to do so much heavy grunt work, and thus can think on deeper questions? I really don't see the final outcome being knowledge work for humans completely disappearing. In fact having something that potentially can do it better and faster will make keeping up with that knowledge all the more fascinating won't it? This whole conversation feels like what someone with an abacus would say when they saw the first digital pocket calculator.

I agree with you. If we ever want to invent warp drive, a machine that lets us do it much faster ought to be a god send. If there are scientific solutions to our biggest problems, this should be a blessing.

But the risk is of course that the benefits will not be distributed but concentrated to the elite.

That's just fantasy.

Which part, the warp drives, ya probably. But other tech advances beyond the human mind? Why would that be?

What is?

Sure, I do not believe warp drive is possible, but it was of course just an example.

> [...] scientific solutions to our biggest problems [...]

> [...] benefits will not be distributed but concentrated to the elite.

That's the part that's being called out as a fantasy.

Do we see a society where the market will value humans over AI without, like, any specific thing impelling the market to do that?

I mean, a combination of political and economic factors from 1930s to 1960s forced the wealthy to return a portion of the returns of automation to the remaining working people. Then from the late 70's till now, those in power have clawed back all those gains.

Of course, any further gains from automation will go to the very wealthy unless things change.

> I mean, a combination of political and economic factors from 1930s to 1960s forced the wealthy to return a portion of the returns of automation to the remaining working people.

The credible threat of communist revolutions put the fear of god into the capitalist elites. So they had to share a larger share of wealth with workers, beyond mere subsistence wages, to keep them peaceful. With the downfall of USSR, communist revolutions stopped being a credible threat, and elites clawed back productivity gains, pushing workers toward subsistence wages again.

> something that potentially can do it better and faster will make keeping up with that knowledge all the more fascinating won't it?

Yes, but it won’t be work anymore, in the sense that you won’t get paid for it, if machines can do the knowledge work just as well or better. We aren’t there yet, of course, but this future seems quite possible and might not be that far off (possibly within our lifetime). So you could explore deep questions (that machines can explore much faster and more thoroughly) as a leisure activity, like sightseeing on vacation.

> like sightseeing on vacation.

Or like musing while you are plowing your field by hand wondering how many of your kids will survive the coming winter.

What makes you think that humans will be able to keep up with all that knowledge in the future?

Why would it want mathematics, id the math could be found faster without them? And even if you accept the argument that math is about human understanding (I don't buy that, it feels a lot like cope), why would anyone be a mathematician when the job consists of un-sloppifying a mountain of proofs, without the capability of meaningfully contribute to their creation?

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