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Comment by lkey | Hacker News Reader

The social fabric that produces math got ripped up by marketing guys who didn't even bother to check their work.

He described it at 'strip mining', 'rude', and said that many grad students, who are given problems like these as a part of their training, had the rug pulled out from under them (because its customary to let people know you are working on something to prevent this kind of thing).

And your whole analysis is that Tao is worried about his 'identity', status, and 'being a differentiator'.

This is projection on your part. People have values that bear no resemblance to yours and it would behoove you to learn to recognize that.

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The "not bothering to check" part is the most annoying.

There are already several of these "proofs" that have been retracted because they did not make sense.

I would have no problem accepting this whole ordeal if the humans behind each proof took the time to re-read, understand and synthesize the result in a readable paper.

There is ample evidence of how damaging fake information can be, and paper retraction never fully undoes the damage (see the Andrew Wakefield and his antivax "paper" for instance).

> He described it at 'strip mining'

Strip mining what, platonic reality? Mathematicians don't have a monopoly on mathematical truth. It doesn't exist for their benefit.

It doesn’t exist for OpenAI’s benefit either. The point of the “strip mining” analogy is that they are churning through the mathematical landscape in a way that optimizes for the number of problems solved rather than the amount of understanding of those problems.

But is understanding the end goal? Understanding for the sake of understanding? Or understanding for the sake of being able to solve problems for the benefit of humanity?

Yes, understanding is the end goal. That’s what defines the field of (theoretical) mathematics. There’s a separate field, called “applied and computational mathematics” or just “applied mathematics”, for research that focuses on computing concrete results.

What is the end goal? It's not making life better for humans, because we're posting about humans fucking hating this.

It's not about improving understanding, as you just pointed out.

So why? What the purpose? Is it just pure misanthropy?

> because we're posting about humans fucking hating this

A small subset of humans who lost a bunch of comparative advantage hate it. Most people who care about math in the abstract probably think it's really cool!

Most people don't think about math, and we're watching all intellectual work "lose its comparative advantage".

The thing I liked about humanity was its ability to think. Making that valueless is not my idea of progress.

Strip mining interesting conjectures. AI can answer interesting(pedagogically valuable, carrying important implications, etc.) mathematical questions in formally correct gibberish far faster than mathematicians can generate them. Until AI can replace the conjectures it resolves on its own, it's consuming a finite resource.

Will AI be unable to produce new conjectures?

Does creativity need sentience?

No. Genetic diversity and natural selection have created many intricate, beautiful, and useful structures. Unless someone is willing to argue that Darwinian selection is sentient, it's clear that theres at least one non sentient process that is creative.

The papers created by AI on math, right now, are torturous reads. Figuring out what is actually going on in them, is the work of months or even years.

I’ve seen multiple conference submissions that read like English, but take hours of effort to disentangle and figure out what they mean.

There is a limited number of known interesting problems that are worthwhile to engage in. New ones are found and understood, but it is a slow process and it is dependent on understanding and verification, not generation of content.

Saying AI will create new ones, strengthens the strip mining analogy. The idea that AI will find other problems parallels the idea that firms can cut down a forest and plant them elsewhere.

The conversation on HN is driven by non mathematicians, to whom math is a subject, like “nature”. It’s not their core business. The original post by Tao is a better source of information on what he means.

It can't consistently produce new, interesting-to-humans conjectures faster than it solves open problems, no. AI-generated natural-language proofs are more or less human-unreadable and are solely concerned with the process of constructing whatever object serves as the counterexample. Natural-language counterparts of formally verified proofs are often unfaithful to the formal component. All of this combines to create less-than-fertile ground for future study.

It is usually not the monopolist who is protesting against strip mining, it is usually the monopolist doing the strip mining and the environmentalist protesting it. Which is to say, I don’t think mathematicians are claiming a monopoly on mathematics, but I think AI might.

It's time for the social fabric of math to be ripped up, it's an industry being disrupted.

No one has the right to prevent others from working on a math problem. If you're working on a problem the best way to not get scooped is transparency: publish whatever you have as soon as possible.

Tao's behavior is most consistent with any other worker resisting automation for selfish reasons.

Tao is very prominently an early AI adopter. He, and other mathematicians, have fruitfully integrated it into their work. The way it is integrated matters, and it is carelessness and selfishness on the part of OpenAI that he is objecting to.

> It's time for the social fabric [of math] to be ripped up

This is the attitude of a social arsonist. You can, and should, integrate changes without maximizing destruction for its (or Altman's) own sake.

> an industry being disrupted.

This is the SV euphemism for law-breaking and monopolist practices in a country that has forgotten how to prosecute those with the most power and privilege.

> This is the SV euphemism for law-breaking and monopolist practices

Quite the opposite. The mathematicians are the monopolists who are upset that new-comers are able to do their job better than them, and even worse, they are giving it away to the world for free!

The horror! People giving knowledge to the world for anyone to use freely! Won't someone think of the oligopoly that was coordinating to make sure each of the gatekeepers get their slice of the pie?

Monopoly: Exclusive control of a particular market that is marked by the power to control prices and exclude competition.

Mathematics is collaboratively and publicly produced, it is vetted for free by peers, and results are publicly available. There is no 'market' and no 'price'.

These results, like the invention of LLMs, are often used by private companies for the generation of private profit.

"Open" AI used a private, unreleased, for-profit model to generate those papers.

What, precisely, did the mathematics 'oligopoly' gatekeep you, or anyone, from?

> their slice of the pie

There's very little money in academia, and even then, its a struggle to get any funding at all. What are you even talking about?

Final point, 'knowledge' is socially produced as well. Until the papers are accepted, they are machine artifacts that might be knowledge, but that same system you disdain will be what incorporates and validates those insights.

> Mathematics is collaboratively and publicly produced, it is vetted for free by peers, and results are publicly available. There is no 'market' and no 'price'.

How wonderful then! You should be happy to know that the AI companies are releasing information for free for all to collaborate on then!

> What, precisely, did the mathematics 'oligopoly' gatekeep

Well what they are trying to do is convince the AI companies to stop releasing all of their findings. Because they are upset that other people are able to do their job better than they are. Its the classic gatekeeper move.

> There's very little money

Oh there is much more than money to silly games like these. Instead, clout and the admiration of their peers, in this tiny insular group for sure, is what most of these people are so desperate to acquire.

Fame (well... relative.... in their subgroup) and admiration of their peers is a much stronger motivation factor for humans than mere money.

> but that same system you disdain

I don't distain anyone who is willing to get with the times. My distain is held out only for those who want to prevent the rest of the world from using the latest tools to achieve real results. If a mathmatician simply doesn't care and isn't wineing about all this AI stuff, I have no issue with them.

The rug being pulled is the expectation of a reasonably high-trust ethical environment. The question to be asked is: What will graduate study look like in an utterly zero trust ethical environment?

If there is still such a thing as graduate study. If there is still such a thing as study. Tell me what to say to someone about to enter college about why it isn't a waste of their time.

yeah, let's all be stupid together

Most colleges, even before LLMs, were already a waste of time for most students. I mean they were somewhat effective for networking and economic signaling to employers but they had already lost the plot in terms of real value to society. And now with LLMs the entire education system will need to be rebuilt. Let's get to work.

Because learning is fun, useful and addictive all on its own?

This was already why people went to grad school. I think people weigh a complex bag of known and perceived motivations and risks. One of the risks is that your project gets "scooped." There were some weak ethical and practical safeguards around that. But completely rearranging the risk equation will change peoples minds about whether graduate study is worth it.

Disclosure: PhD, early 1990s. In my case, replicating my project would have required a sizable investment in equipment, much of it was purpose-built, among other things.

Interestingly we're a few months away from a data point on what happens to grad school applications.

Shitty. Why do you think people are complaining that AI is making life worse?

The ethics of academic research weren't idyllic, but they were the devil known. It was at least informally accepted that a student should have a fair chance of finishing their project. Cherry picking student projects and publishing them ahead of the student was considered unethical. I got my graduate degree under those conditions, as did my parents.

In math, proofs are "the coin of the realm," and could be devalued to zero. This leaves no answer as to how someone will earn a graduate degree. For instance, what kind of work will be accepted by a thesis committee in five years? The professoriat can only say "we will need to change some things." That's not good enough when the deadline for grad school applications is a few months away.

Well they've been doing that to devs for a couple of years now and yet mathematicians seem to be much more vocal whingers (might be selection bias in the articles I'm reading though).

AI is coming for all of us knowledge workers, nobody is immune.

Um…us devs have been whinging with the best of them thank you very much.

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