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by cubefox7 hours ago |
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upvoteby ksoped7 hours ago|
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Did he say so somewhere? I don't think these ideas are contradictory. It's just an pro AI tooling but anti-slop stance.
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upvoteby cubefox7 hours ago|
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Where is the difference?
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upvoteby SpicyLemonZest6 hours ago|
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He sees value in mathematicians using AI to carefully study mathematics, develop an understanding of both old and new things, and help others understand the new things.

He doesn't see value in scrolling through unsolved problems asking an AI to please solve them. In his view, this is a fundamental confusion about what mathematical research is for. Knocking down unsolved problems without developing the community's understanding of them is like prompting Claude to go through a Jira board, write code for all the open tickets, and then close them without merging or deploying the code.

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upvoteby glitchc2 hours ago|
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> He doesn't see value in scrolling through unsolved problems asking an AI to please solve them.

Yet that's exactly how the field works. A new grad student is tasked with finding a suitably difficult problem from a list of unsolved problems. The sweet spot is obscure, so that fewer people are working on it, but not too obscure that no one knows about it. It works the same way in theoretical physics and theoretical Comp Sci, and I speak from insider knowledge. The rosy view of mathematicians in the media is largely a product of marketing.

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upvoteby qlte9 minutes ago|
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The letter addresses this specifically.
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upvoteby SpicyLemonZest37 minutes ago|
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The authors of the declaration agree with you that this is how the field works today. They think that fact causes AI use to produce bad results, and they want to reformulate how the field works so that AI use will produce good results instead.
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upvoteby bluecheese4525 hours ago|
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Isn’t it more like it merges the code without a dev reviewing or understanding it?
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upvoteby dbmikus4 hours ago|
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Pretty close, but IMO not quite. A math proof in and of itself is useless unless either:

   (A) it furthers human knowledge
   (B) it gets used in applied sciences, engineering, etc.
If you merge and deploy code, you have released a tool that can be used. If you ship a gibberish math proof, it's not useful unless someone else can understand and deploy it to some other means. Now, it's possible AI could understand and make use of the math proofs, even if we can't, which refutes some of my hair splitting :)
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upvoteby coderenegade1 hours ago|
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Not necessarily. That's the best case scenario, but proofs can be intrinsically useful in and of themselves. It's just that for problems of that nature, speculative work is often done ahead of time, e.g. the body of work that already exists assuming the Riemann hypothesis is true.
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upvoteby SpicyLemonZest4 hours ago|
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No. Merged code can perform actions with effects on the world, even if a human being never saw it. Constructing a giant Lean formalization that nobody understands simply doesn't do anything.
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upvoteby jrecursive6 hours ago|
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taste
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upvoteby genxy5 hours ago|
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"I believe I did, Bob" lives rent free, every time someone tells another person to fuck themselves using technology.

Thank You!

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upvoteby jrecursive5 hours ago|
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lmao, thank you, i think
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upvoteby genxy3 hours ago|
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Please consider making more comics. You have it.
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upvoteby darkstarsys4 hours ago|
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Yes. I find it really interesting to consider what the machines do and will think of as intrinsically interesting to them. Will they develop their own theories of beauty, mathematical and otherwise?
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