Comment by lukehandcool | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lukehandcool | Hacker News Reader

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I watched this video yesterday. I highly recommend it. Two things come to my mind.

Yes, something is lost, and that something deserves to be mourned. It's a big change and it will take some time to figure out what math looks like going forward, so if you are upset that is totally valid. But... this has potential to be amazing. If we can prove anything with the snap of our fingers, let's see how far that can take us. Let's explore unknown areas of math. Let's develop new fields to unlock new understanding.

Secondly, what Grant didn't touch on was a different fear I have. The fear of what will happen if all this power is centralized into a few companies. It's hard for me to envision a world like that and be very excited about it. Math has almost always been accessible to nearly the whole world. If that changes, I don't see that being a good thing for any of us.

That's why I feel very strongly that open models and open source are the best path forward.

It seems like part of the reason openai did what it did by not giving a heads up to the researchers about the release of the problems was that they might just want to divert resources away from math and become a math research entity unto themselves. The be all and end all of these research areas that AI is really good at. Like if you are beginning your math career you might just thing, why don't I just interview at openai, they seem to have a math "department"?

It's a bit crazy to imagine that world where frontier academic research as a publicly funded thing to train next generation could be dead and reborn in the hands of corporations.

“that world where frontier academic research as a publicly funded thing to train next generation could be dead and reborn in the hands of corporations” is one of main goals of all the AI hyperscalers (and already priced in the valuations). Privatize everything, socialize every cost.

Some costs are too large to be absorbed even by society as a whole. Can you privatize rational thought?

Mathematics goes into Physics, into Chemistry, molecular Biology and so on. It "goes" there by mathematicians talking with people there and exchanging ideas about what and how to model it.

Imagine all that getting privatized, walled into a corporate garden, accessible via payment only, similar to academic journals. Thought on demand.

How long does a society like that last?

It does not, was my point.

The hyperscalers and their investors no longer live in our society (see Thiel’s pipe dreams of immortality in a New Zealand bunker) and plan to bring it down for profit, dismantling the institutions that we built to protect it.

Wasn't Bell Labs this in the past? It existed alongside public research institutes.

True. Pure Math does seem different. It's effects are felt way down the line and it's more about training people to think a certain way(what 3b1b creator pointed to). And I think when it's discussed they are talking about an entire field changing— material science, theoretical physics is still taught post bell.labs in unis — but I have to comceded I dunno if there is any part of pure Math that exists without the system of incentives, grant structures going into Universities that teach math...

> Pure Math does seem different.

Claude Shannon's paper that kicked off the entire field of information theory was published in the Bell System Technical Journal.

I share the thread's concern over this much centralization of power, but it is worth mentioning that private-sector pure research isn't exactly new. In fact it feels like we had a lot more of it in the 1900s, maybe it's good that it's at least getting revived a bit.

>divert resources away from math and become a math research entity unto themselves

If only pure math were a source of riches, that might work out well for them.

I have a book on mathematical cranks where that seems to be the common delusion, that if only you solve some open problems then fame and fortune must surely follow.

I mean the people. I didn't mean or think that math research fundinng was a source of riches anyway; It's funded currently by mostly public money, how rich can any math researchers get from public money(compared to RSUs from stock grants)?

I think it depends on the motivation of the funding partners. I think funding is mostly about building researcher and student talent and knowledge moving forward.

To transfer that to AI in private hands seems a bit crazy, but what do I know? I think funding bodies will stay the course in the short term before bending to some behind closed doors persuasion to feed the AI machine.

The ai companies are yet again strip mining public goods and institutions

OpenAI is already a "math research" company

Computer science has been a subset of math since the field was established decades before the first vacuum tube or transistor based machine was invented

"Computer" was coined to describe humans who did math all day

What we been doing the last few decades is fundamentally just algebra relative to values in RAM; LLMs only work because of math: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668

def arbitraryFunctionName() { some math to achieve a physical state in memory } ...where arbitrary function name is some biz logic or use case

We're just pushing those arbitrary semantics from the code to the presentation layer; just need to ship a kernel that handles geometry transforms to draw to screen what looks like a text editor and a video game and label it via the GUI

Text systems are just outdated GUI that we had to start with due to hardware limitations back in the day.

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