There might be a “proof motive” in math which one could argue will drive the full automation of theorem proving. But we must recognize that profit is more universally valuable (i.e. it has value outside the industry in which it was created), whereas proofs are only valuable inside the math community (at least the pure math proofs the labs have been publishing thus far).
Do rich people like opera? Yes. Is that a profit motive? No... but it's a shibboleth for wanting to be rich. Do you get it?
It's ridiculous to say, no profit motive in mathematics. It's like saying, no profit motive in LISP. But cmon, you think the Collison brother who took Math 55 and liked LISP: I know that in a pedantic sense what you mean. But in terms of academic departments where people say they are no interested in money and it turns out they want to become billionaires... Math Department ranks pretty highly. Always has.
People have been dreaming running PS5 games on PC for a long time. Just when AI starting to become capable of doing that, Anthropic shut it down.
Yeah you can dream, but only what we allow.
2. Even if someone wants to do something that’s in a legal grey area, or more (hacking others, another item limited by Anthropic), is the idea that such people won’t have the ability to use AI to do those things? I don’t understand the criticism that just because one company might institute some guard rails that those who want to conduct legally grey or black activities will be unable to use other AIs to do so?
Yeah you can dream, but only what we allow.
Only this time we are the horses and argue about the car engine not having the intuition on where to put the hooves.
There’s an immediate resistance towards change rather than embracing it and finding opportunities to improve and work with it.
Maybe some math departments could pay OpenAI for access to their models, but I doubt OpenAI would want to deal with most of them.
Maybe we should listen to people that care about negative externalities more often, and actually mitigate them.
What? Only websites that want to track you before opting in have cookie banners. HN doesn't have a cookie banner, in case you haven't noticed. I'd say your issue isn't with consumer protection, but with pushy marketing people (or worse). But they're good at marketing, hence the cookie banner nonsense complaints, which redirect the anger towards laws requiring that creeps announce their presence, rather than the creeps themselves.
I guess you can dream big enough only if you have access to the really interesting models. The 20$ subscription won't get you there, and the 100$ one is already out of reach for so many people.
You can drive 1000 miles and arrive at the destination on the highway quickly.
Or you can take the slow road and walk. You discover unrelated things, make new relationships, see the scenery, listen and smell what is around you and have time to contemplate things which may or not be related.
This particular tool economy robs us of all these things in the rush to the destination.
I'd sacrifice "progress" a little for some of the better bits of humanity.
I get your point in general, but I think vehicles are a poor analogy because in many ways they have changed the places we live for the worse (and yes I’ll concede occasionally for the better). It turns out we need places to park all of these vehicles and they compete for space with humans.
That analogy holds too.
(And even more if you can combine them.)
The first sentence is actually a much better jumping off point for the other side of the argument than yours, because the mistakes involved in the statement should set off alarm bells for people who've walked with mathematics.
What do you mean by "place"? What do you mean by "more"?
Are there more places as marked by real numbers between 0 and 1, or places as marked by integers? Could a machine that can count integers 1000000 times faster than people "visit" all those real places between 0 and 1? What would it mean to visit all the places between 0 and 1? Once the machine visited all of them how would it help people explore that territory?
What do the general ratios and rules between paths and areas mean about how much path it takes to cover an area?
The real world is quantized in way that math isn't, of course, but that's one way the analogy can lead you astray.
And even just keeping to the real world rather than math, it's not all about the sheer velocity with which you can cover an arbitrary distance metric. The primary bottleneck is less that velocity than the amount of time you have to direct to place scaled to your capacities. The car's velocity can let you trade some of that time for fast travel between farther places, and with a road network can arguably even increase a certain variety of places, but that's a very different statement than more places. And it's also a wall against attention to everything in between.
I'm sure there's a coherent rebuttal but "That is plainly rubbish" isn't the reply I'd expect in good-faith discussion
I think pointing at Greenland for a start and asking you to think about the problem for a bit will lead to the same coherent view on the matter.
Or if you're just saying that a very good backpacker that happens to be in greenland can get more places by walking because of a lack of roads, that might be true. But for a normal person in a typical household, their walking range is not that big. If you're in the US or Europe the roads reach almost everywhere.
They neglect to build sidewalks, and force you to walk 1-2 meters from cars racing at 70 km/h. With all the noise and high risk stressing you up to the level you just wanna scream.
stevenhuang: No one forces you to drive. You can still walk.
Not everybody in the world is effectively forced to drive. Sure, maybe if someone has the misfortune to be an US city they have no other option but there are other places that are not like that and cities with good public transport and relatively low car usage.
Or has he changed his mind again.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Singularity? Probably not.
Tech bro dictatorship? Unfortunately a bit more likely.
None of the above? Then we have a small shot at a great future.
Having a machine that solves hard problems must be a good thing.