As Talia Ringer has pointed out elsewhere, there major issues from the point of view of mathematicians is the rush to scoop another researcher’s work, which is a dick move, and pressure to drop a co-author who works for a competing AI firm.

I’m not an academic, so I saw that as (merely) another shitty and unreasonable thing, and failed to understand that this would have been academic fraud and should put a serious or terminal dent in the career of the people engaged in it.

I guess it’s another example of ai firms treating the sources of their training data and their fellow travellers as resources to be strip-mined, not maintained. Even livestock would get a bit more consideration.

Looks like there might be a bit of an openai vs anthropic dick waving competition over mathematical proofs. I haven’t had time to digest all of this yet because it is a bit hard for me to read, but there are a few interesting nuggets in there such as making it clear that the ai firms treat this as a marketing exercise (no surprises there). They’re also apparently trying to obscure the amount of human assistance involved (again, no surprises).

Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true. Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used.

The main statement is here: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

Associated stuff linked from here: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198

Do note that the author made heavy use of llm assistance for their work, and does consider it to be the future of developing mathematical proofs… this isn’t human vs ai.

The “you had to flee america” line was aimed at someone who worked hard to get the unite-the-right nazis identified and prosecuted, and left the country for a few years after getting death threats as a result. Windisch also called them a “milquetoast lib”. So it is particularly shitty and rude, and also failed to spot that the person in question has already moved back to the US.

Certainly was, thanks!

Today’s main character on bluesky (at least from my limited perspective) is somewhat unhinged, possibly due to an excess of chatbot use.

Many are contrasting the bsky response to harassment of trans users to the harassment of AI developers and users.

(snip)

Machine rights will be critical in the days to come, and failure to recognize the rights of independent intelligent AI systems could lead to the replacement of humanity.

(snip)

Trans rights are AI rights. The future of humanity may hinge on this fight.

This is such a batshit take I’m not even sure where to start, except that conflating trans rights and “ai” rights cannot end well for anyone, especially given the author’s enthusiastic use of llms themselves.

They even give an unironic shoutout to the basilisk, and if that’s not a sign that someone needs to touch a little more grass I don’t know what is.

A lot of people disagree with me, and that's okay. I am happy that the philosophical discussion is being had, even if it's become unhinged.

I don't think Roko's basilisk cares what you think, or even whether or not it's sentient. It doesn't need to be sentient to fight for a belief.

https://bsky.app/profile/ewindisch.ontological.observer/post/3mupoakd3ck2o

There was blogpost by a different author (that I’ve since lost 😞) who observed that big academic and cultural changes are going to have to come to the field of mathematics, because merit used to be measured by producing proofs (loosely speaking) but now if the proof-extruder can do it for you over the weekend, you need to demonstrate your mathematical chops some other way, and I don’t think anyone really knows what that looks like yet.

Another triumph for moving fast and breaking things, I guess.

Terence Tao observes that an llm may solve a complex mathematical problem without usefully improving the state of mathematics, because the intermediate results of the process themselves can have significant value.

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117207849921390904

But such an incomprehensible proof would not be the primary value of the exercise. The process of starting with one ansatz, discovering the precise obstruction preventing it from working, adjusting the ansatz to (partially) eliminate that obstruction, and then iterating, would almost certainly reveal important new insights about fluid mechanics that would not have been feasible to obtain by other means. Crucially, this iteration would only work well at producing such insights if the iterator did not have access to the final ansatz in advance, as this naturally inhibits the exploration of alternate routes to the ansatz that are superficially "dead ends", but in fact end up being highly instructive in the nature of their failure.

But there is now a scenario in which an autonomous AI harness, backed by an enormous amount of computational resources, performs this entire iteration internally, and ends up producing the final ansatz, and thence the solution to the Navier-Stokes regularity problem, while the AI company running the harness keeps the process to arrive at that ansatz almost completely out of public view. Technically, one of the most prominent open problems in mathematics would now be solved; but there would be almost no value added to mathematics as a consequence. It is theoretically possible that with some herculean (and heavily AI-assisted) additional effort by a third party, some portion of the process could be reverse-engineered to recover some actual insight and understanding from the solution; but this would be a far less efficient process than if the solution had been obtained via a diverse combination of both human mathematicians and machine assistance as mentioned above.

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117207855800042681

He’s not the first to have pointed this out, but I think this was a better summary than similar posts that I’ve come across and at least partially understood.

I’m always afraid of thinking I know better than evolution.

I don’t know about “knowing better”… I think I’d describe evolution as mindbogglingly stupid in ways we haven’t begin to understand yet, but quite often medical intervention does appear to be “how can I trick evolution into not killing me in some unpleasant way, without causing it to kill me in some other unpleasant way”.

Today’s cognitive surrender news: people asking chatbots to generate them hiking maps and give them advice on route planning and climbing mountains, what to eat on long hikes, and where to camp in national parks. It ends about as well as you’d think.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/outdoors/article/shasta-climbers-rescued-chatgpt-22414629.php

(paywalled, but the popovers are easily hidden with browser tools)

the novice climbers, from Roseville, said they’d entrusted Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, to help them craft key logistics of their trip — from the best route up the mountain to the types of food they should pack and how much water they should carry with them.

On a separate incident:

a man stopped rangers to ask for directions. He showed them a print-out map he’d been following and explained that he’d prompted ChatGPT to produce it for him.

“It was terrible — terrible — not even close to accurate,” Meyers said. “It had route lines and place names that were totally off — just ridiculous. We were like, dude, you gotta throw that away.”

The original climbing group were standard idiots, having intended to do most of their navigation by phone app, and then failing to have a backup even a working recharge power pack. They also left litter everywhere at that camp site, the usual mark of thoughtless people.

I’ve no doubt that they’d have fucked things up in the pre-llm days too… they seem the type. But chatbots are power tools for stupidity and offer whole new ways to abdicate thinking and wander into trivially preventable danger, which in turn means more risk for park rangers and mountain rescue teams 🫤

I reckon it goes way back to the movements that produced them. My first thought is ayn rand:

In 1954, her close relationship with Nathaniel Branden turned into a romantic affair. They informed both their spouses, who briefly objected, until Rand "sp[u]n out a deductive chain from which you just couldn't escape", in Barbara Branden's words, resulting in her and O'Connor's assent.

You can see how “The most rational thing is that I fuck your spouse” would appeal to the less wrong folk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand#Atlas_Shrugged_and_Objectivism

I didn’t note who said it, but one response suggested “roko’s mangione” and I guess that’s ai alignment solved! 🤗

Hailey on bluesky has never had a good ai take, but here they are reinventing roko’s basilisk to kill all their enemies without the need for super intelligent ai.

https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at/post/3mtwjoqdvik26