unknownian

I could address your situation in several ways and it would be a long discussion that a quick soundbite wouldn’t really satisfy. But at the very least, your argument is one of the arguments I would use to question the privatization of pure math by LLM companies. Pure math has little value to society so AI companies should consider not getting involved when they aren’t really making life better for anyone and are possibly harming young academics.

But to give a brief answer to your question directly: In my view, and I think many if they really thought about it, the point of life is to overcome. If there is an AI that spits out the answer to questions that don’t directly impact human wellbeing instead of letting humans explore the answer at our own pace, we should question whether that AI is worth keeping around or at least relying on too much.

Obviously the question is more nuanced when it comes to math, because even pure math can have applications to understanding reality and improving human wellbeing.

So the question then becomes what do we do with the AI when it can both improve our wellbeing and remove meaning from our lives? Is a life without struggle worth a life without meaning? Personally I don’t think so, so I think we have to optimize all of the benefits of AI while essentially taking a harsh stance against all the harms. Currently the main harm is to education, and that’s why I think we should question and probably even disallow its use by students still working to demonstrate their skills.

If you were a math grad student, would you rather your advisor be telling you to LLM maxx your ideas or working with you and giving you ideas on your thesis personally? I know my answer.

“We should give the password for our university laptops running LaTeX to the robots and go sit at home.”

It also ignores the fact that among fashion enthusiasts (hardcore consumers NOT producers) handmade and artisanal clothing is generally preferred.

The problem is this: “Astra write me a masters thesis applying new techniques programming language theory to Rust” is not using a tool, it’s hiring someone to do the work and thinking for you.

I have difficulty figuring out how to solve this issue.

Some of these academics are still alive. Perhaps it was due to propaganda as you were saying, but I really believe that they meant it.

The main problem is that without safeguards it becomes impossible to adjudicate new work in math or CS, meaning grad students who care about originality in work will have little sense of accomplishment if the AI gives them all the answers and will decide to study something else. Not to mention that AI users in math/CS are often ignoring standards in publishing, including issues with plagiarism and scooping of work. These are pretty serious problems that will end up causing a lot of people to move to other subjects.

If you read any classic mathematics or computer science textbook, you get the sense that the author wants to impart the idea that this subject leads to an interesting and meaningful life. There are many famous quotes about being the architect or designer of an idea rather than just a technician holding a power tool following instructions someone else wrote. Now all of those adages have become effectively meaningless because so many involved in these careers are cool with the industry dying for some vague notion of progress due to a machine god. It’s a pathetic state of affairs that the elders aren’t speaking out more to protect the next generation of human thinking.

I say this as someone who uses LLMs in the physical sciences (one of the only areas where I would say it is ethical to use them).

As someone who cares a lot about AI/LLMs making breakthroughs in certain areas like medicine due to my own history with health problems, if it means all the stimulating experiences of life become meaningless, sometimes I wonder if it will be worth it in the end. Which is why I dread the future where their negative externalities aren’t reigned in.

You think a top 2 greatest mathematician alive is out of touch?

It’s more like avoiding looking at the answer key while doing homework to be able to pass an exam and to understand the material better, especially for the grad students who haven’t gotten their PhDs yet. Personally I think responsible AI use is possible (not all AHM members completely avoid AI, but it’s notable that some heavy hitters do), but it’s best not to use a closed model trying to replace you. Use an open model that won’t train on your data.

How do you think a PhD committee should referee a dissertation where all the ideas came from AI?

I don’t have a problem with using AI in the applied sciences once a researcher has proven their skills. I do have a problem with it damaging education, the pure math pipeline, and art.

There are an infinite number of problems that require a unique proof (you can prove this btw). Yes maybe you need to work harder to find a more obscure problem now but why give up the fight already? I believe that students should have the right to intellectually stimulating education. If you really need to use AI, go for something that isn’t trying to put you out of business or destroy your right to a decent education, like a local open weights LLM.

You tell them to cancel their Astra subscriptions and get to work. Hundreds of mathematicians, including Peter Scholze, have already agreed to not use AI at all. There’s absolutely no reason to help train an AI that will just make your own life more miserable.

https://www.ahmath.org/members

The best part is that when the academics fix OAI’s issues, the model gets better and OAI shareholders get richer and more powerful!

As someone who uses LLM tech occasionally, this is why I prefer using open local models. If I’m making myself obsolete, at least I’m not making some asshole richer and their closed model better.

Lmao what a ridiculous response. Yes, some mathematicians and artists are in it to feel smart. But the vast majority also just enjoy the process. Having a computer do all the work for you and just typing prompts in ruins that completely. As Ronny Chieng said in his Harvard speech, the journey is the point.

>Any mathematician in academic or industry is more than likely not a "pure math" person (tainted by capitalism)

Ignoring that I meant pure as in non applied math, let's just make it clear: you agree that mathematicians who are against capitalism encroaching on this process should be allowed to dislike it without criticism of being pretentious?

You shouldn't be getting downvoted for something that a majority of pure math and art enthusiasts believe to be true. The truth is many of these entrepreneurs and VCs are obsessed with AI not for money or human progress, but because it makes them feel closer to being a "god" rather than a mere mortal. Much of it (especially AI art) is out of spite for human creativity, which is done by mortals with limitations.

I’m vehemently anti-genAI in creative fields but even I think this metric is stupid and unfair to younger generations and generations to come, even if genAI writing gets better.

If you can’t trust a contemporary writer to not use genAI, then find another interest with true zero trust creative verification (like improv) because copying and cheating on writing has existed for decades.

However, my unpopular opinion is extremist in another way: societies should probably not tolerate AI in creative fields like creative writing at all, if Sora can be shut down, so can other useless and toxic parts of LLMs.

>like the AGPL?

As I explained in an earlier thread, MongoDB tried using AGPL. AGPL is not a barrier for Amazon, they still will resell your product without contributing. MongoDB ended up using a variant of AGPL that is even stricter (requiring the entire tech stack to be under the same license) but is no longer considered FOSS. Until the attitude changes around what FOSS is, this will keep happening.

Are you disagreeing with me or just giving more detail? Because I think that's what I was saying. My opinion is that this is not fair to a company like MongoDB.

Then why did Mongo relicense? I assumed that AGPL was not enough to maintain their business which is why they are now using a more extreme form of AGPL that is no longer considered Free.

I enjoyed the post and this is off-topic but when I was younger I was very pro-GPL and I still like copyleft, but to me the logic behind it makes less and less sense as time goes on. RMS compares software to a physical book you can modify, make copies of, and share with your friends, but in my opinion, software is much more like a power drill, a tool you can modify with difficulty and let people borrow. The analogy for software as media is also ironic because the FSF themselves claim that the GPL is not intended for media works and recommend other licenses (like Creative Commons which I support).

I do like the idea that GPL prevents big corps from taking advantage of programmers, but the idea that a GPL program is inherently better than a proprietary program written by an independent developer no longer makes sense to me, though independent proprietary software is often abandoned. But more importantly, it doesn't seem fair when a company makes an AGPL devops tool and then a bigger corp just sells that product as a service. When companies like MongoDB decide to change their licenses so that Amazon doesn't steal all their customers, I don't feel bad about it at all. I have no skin in this game but it blows my mind that there are FSF people who defend massive corporations essentially reselling a smaller company's work solely for the sake of ideological purity. Someone can correct me if I've been misinformed here.

I saw Tom be the awards emcee at Yale's hackathon and I don't really get why he acts the way he does. It's some persona that makes people hate startup founders even more than they already do. Add the Yale tag to that and boom you've got your classic Ivy privilege douchebag. I know people from Ivies (including my own) and it's really rare for people to act like this. Is he giving these groups a bad name? I don't know him personally, and he's probably a fine guy, but it seemed like by the end of the event people were sort of sick of his antics.

>MRI executes Ruby via an interpreted stack-machine bytecode language known as YARV

On Wikipedia: >Since YARV has become the official Ruby interpreter for Ruby 1.9, it is also named KRI (Koichi's Ruby Interpreter), in the same vein as the original Ruby MRI, named for Ruby's creator Yukihiro Matsumoto.

So is one of them wrong? I'm confused.

>I don't think there's an app for Syncthing

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nutomic.sy...

Yeah, I knew about the middle device thing, but it seemed like a hassle when the Android app is a bit alpha-ish.

A problem is that if you want to sync regular text files to apps on your phone we have formed somewhat of a Dropbox monoculture where DB is generally the main or sometimes the only syncing option available in mobile apps. We should really start to move away from these tools.

Syncthing is great, but the devs say they can't develop a mechanism for sync between operating systems on the same computer, which is something I really need.

Is there a word to describe the structure of the notation of mathematics versus programming syntax versus the English language?

Oh, I guess I read too quickly. Comments on those sites really are terrible.