Hacker News Reader

Comment by pebbly_bread | Hacker News Reader

Yes there's still useful work only mathematicians can do, what is the incentive system that encourages them to do it? Currently, none.

View on HN

This is not OpenAI's problem.

It's their problem if we make it their problem.

edit: lest this be misconstrued, it can become their problem if it is wildly unpopular and undesireable behavior is regulated away.

I advocate for this path.

What exactly would you be advocating for? That LLMs can't be used to generate mathematical proofs? It's not even a case of intellectual theft, academic papers are in the public domain or can be accessed through a subscription.

What exactly would you want to regulate? And keep in mind that regulations are very effective at protecting incumbents, which, as of right now, also includes openAI.

And thus, the Tech Bro has reached the final stage in its developmental lifecycle.

"Burns down the societal structures for gaining mathematical knowledge"

"Not our problem lmao, our IPO valuation went up"

The Asshole’s Lament

If you invent the ability to tragedise a particular commons, and you also do almost all of the work of turning the crank to make the commons tragic, and then you sit there benefiting from the tragedy of the commons while saying “we may be profiting from it, but the tragedy of the commons is not our problem”, eventually we will figure out what you’re up to.

This is hyperbole at best. Let's try another take: Should a new company making flying cars care about the economic fortunes of tire manufacturers?

Nothing these LLM companies are doing is comparable to a flying car. Perhaps we could ask whether a company making flying monkeys should care about the economic fortunes of bipedal monkeys.

Of course it is. It's a brand new technology with a great deal of potential and some caveats. Something like this has not existed in the history of humanity to date. It's truly mind boggling that a large chunk of humanity's corpus can be compressed to just a trillion bytes, then queried and recombined at whim. Heck, a flying car is less revolutionary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com