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Comment by lkey | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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