Excellent post. A few days ago I must admit I miserably failed to make the main point of this post (understanding) to convince people that they should stop producing code that they don't understand.
I found this extremely hard to do, especially if you are trying to convince people that have absolutely no real contact with source code. The false belief is that now with AI you can run on any topic without even knowing how to crawl.
People are immersed into the false belief that now because you can produce an app from night to day you don't need understanding anything at all. And they are absolutely fine with that. And that to me is the key problem: being ok on any topic without understanding and not realizing the cost of it.
I wish people would at least get deeply informed before making harmful decisions and get only lured by snake oil marketing.
In the end I think all math produced from these companies will be their ruin because they essentially show light on the fundamental problem: to advance you need to understand.
Who has the political authority and/or social power to "do math"?
The issue with "doing math" is the incentive infrastructure. Modern mathematics research has always been tied with leveraging increasingly potent and numerous computing resources. With LLMs the experts are doing what they do best -- utilizing the latest and greatest. OpenAI leveraged an internal model and investment capital most people couldn't hope to touch. That is a display of strength and privilege.
It's motivated by cold hard cash instead of being driven by it. OpenAI wants more investors, more fuel for the fire, and this is how the company has decided to get it done. Token costs have increased, but so has general usage in the population. This is a PR campaign.
> Modern mathematics research has always been tied with leveraging increasingly potent and numerous computing resources.
Why do you need to have potent and numerous computing resources to do math? Engineering could be that. But when I think about math the only thing that comes to my mind is a pen and a piece of paper. Not computing power nor even a calculator.
I couldn't get past the first few paragraphs because this reads as if it was written by a teenager.
Food for thought: if OpenAI hadn't done that proof dump, it would be a matter of a few months until someone had. Maybe an independent researcher, possibly way fewer proofs, but would still have taken the Math world by storm.
The key problem is that the technology and not the company disempowered Mathematicians in a way that we had never seen before.
"My world is changing and I don't like it"
OpenAI really could handle the whole situation better, and it's perfectly fine to call them out on that, but it's not what this piece is about, it's just another AI rant
If you didn't read the post, its main topic is about understanding and how not relying on that just produces a series of results that have little or no value to the math community at all.
Have we read the same article? Did you even read the article at all?
I found no "AI rant" there, the whole thing is a very reasonable criticism of the (very unethical) behavior of OpenAI when it came to math, and how it poisons the well of AI adoption.
The timeline he provides is actually pretty interesting.
Your comment reads like you didn't actually read the post.
Go back and actually read what OP wrote and reconsider your words.
And also reconsider your seemingly blind loyalty to AI.
I found it interesting that this ends with "respect boundaries".
That's the core of all dysfunction - AI or not, isn't it?
People violently smashing through boundaries for their own personal benefit
Surprise: every company or organization larger than say 100 people turns into a narcissistic relationship. This is not unique to AI companies.
When big tech people who don't know what they're talking about come in and ruin your field of study or interest, it's not surprising that said tech will become a pariah.
This is yet another failing of AI.