This whole discussion is basically a field demanding that their field be preserved for them alone to discover. No competition allowed besides the monks of mathematics.
You can invent whatever fantasy you like. I hope more honest people will read the letter (from the fields medalists and other endorsers) and consider it on its merits.
Here's the thing. I read the letter. I'm considering it on its merits. And it has very little. They made great arguments for why it's a good thing that the mathematical community operates the way they do. They could have made a good argument for why practitioners within the mathematical community shouldn't be seduced by the power of AI and should continue to build mathematics they way they do now. Ignoring AI as a tool, but perhaps not ignoring the results coming out of it, builds understanding and skill and develops humans. I'd be all for a letter that calls on humanity to not give up their humanity to AI tools. To not become lazy and overly dependent on them.
The letter makes no arguments why AI companies proving a bunch of results quickly at all affects the ability of mathematicians to do what they want to do. It's just a giant self-congratulatory list of all the wonderful things the mathematical community does and notes that AI companies aren't doing the same thing.
It's not enough for them that they are still free to pursue all the goals they outline in that letter to their hearts content. They want to make sure everyone else doing mathematics also sets aside their own goals and pursue theirs. I distrust AI as a technology regardless of alignment. And I've learned to just not use them and focus on the things in my life that matter to me. It turns out that I'm still free to pursue the things in my life that are meaningful regardless of the existence of LLMs.
The communique from the mathematicians when shorn of polite language is blunt viz.
AI companies are stealing our hard-won lifelong research findings, which we were already sharing freely, without attribution/credit and building upon them without informed consent nor compensation.
It should now be clear that the AI companies behaviour i.e. backstabbing the mathematicians and stealing their life's work is the problem and not the usage of AI itself.
I also pointed you to Self-Determination Theory(SDT) to understand Intrinsic/Extrinsic Motivations that drives Mathematicians (and also Scientists/Researchers/Knowledge-workers) to spend their entire lives in the pursuit of knowledge. From SDT it can be seen that the AI companies behaviour, threatens everybody's Autonomy, nullifies their Mastery/Competence and robs them of Purpose/Relatedness/Belongingness. Nobody should accept this.
A) According to the letter, mathematicians most value:
- mathematicians developing their mastery
- developing mathematics that provides insights and can be eventually synthesized down conceptually to textbook theories
- caring for students and fostering their growth
- human mathematicians getting credit for doing important work
- etc.
B) According to the letter, AI labs aren't trying to do any of these.
Conclusion) The result is that AI is not competing with them in their goals of
- mathematicians developing their mastery
- developing mathematics that provides insights and can be eventually synthesized down conceptually to textbook theories
- caring for students and fostering their growth
- human mathematicians getting credit for doing important work
- etc.
The upshot is that mathematicians still have autonomy to pursue those goals, develop mastery at achieving those goals, and remain part of a community of others pursuing them. The only mathematician who loses these sources of motivation is the one who embraces the use of AI and personally abandons those goals.
The real crisis will come if AI does try to align itself with the goals of the mathematical community and if AI turns out to be better at developing insight, training students, writing comprehensible textbooks, etc. Then the top mathematicians will truly provide little value to their community.
You have conveniently left out the spirit of the mathematicians communique and are only trying to argue its letter which is what makes me think you are being disingenuously clueless or cluelessly disingenuous.
To repeat myself again, the crux of the problem is;
AI companies are stealing our hard-won lifelong research findings, which we were already sharing freely, without attribution/credit and building upon them without informed consent nor compensation.
The AI companies are robbing the mathematicians by not involving them in major decisions about solving the leading/promising research problems in their domain. They are the ones who have identified the problems, its importance, promising approaches of attack etc. which have all been freely shared and which the AI companies have used to build their models.
For example, in the Navier-Stokes case, OpenAI could have easily informed the mathematicians like so, "hey, your research approach looks promising, do you have any objections to us using your research in our models and throwing a lot of compute resources at it so that we can finally solve it?" Every mathematician would have jumped at the chance since that is what he was doing anyway but at a small scale and far slower pace.
Instead OpenAI went behind the mathematicians back while building upon his and others work without attribution/credit nor compensation. This is plagiarism, cheating and despicable behaviour and should not be tolerated by anybody.
Yes. Everything I've said and want to say is about this letter.
Let me try to summarize this discussion in a way that an overly obsequious AI would never dare:
- I argue that the arguments in the letter are bad.
- You mysteriously assign me homework on the topic of human motivation.
- Confused, I reiterate the points made in the letter, and I make arguments against them
- You ignore my arguments, call names, and then defend the letter by making points that the letter doesn't make.
- I ignore your points, because they aren't the points made in the letter. And my original post was about why the letter was misguided.
- You call names. You feel like your points are valid. You then claim that the letter is valid because your points are valid.
- I keep disagreeing with the letter.
- You call names again, because why am I so obsessed with talking about the letter. I must be an idiot, or an evil lying phony, or an evil lying idiot-phony because I keep bringing the conversation back to the letter on a thread about the letter.
I had imagined i was interacting with somebody who could understand the larger picture given only the key points. Apparently that was wrong and i need to spell out every detail.
I didn't call you names but implied that you had an agenda and were masking it by trying to debate the literal words in the original communique from 25 fields medalists which was written to be politically correct. Apparently asking you to "focus on the spirit and not the letter" of the communique was too much. So i highlighted it, repeated myself three/four times and yet nothing seems to have worked to aid comprehension.
I point to a most important and relevant psychological theory viz. SDT, which explains how one's behaviour is influenced by intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and ask you to think about how they might explain why the mathematicians are angry at the current situation of AI companies shafting them. I even used specific terminology from SDT to highlight its applicability in this case. Apparently this is too much "home work" (and needed thinking) and one needs to spoon-feed everything without assuming any human intelligence/curiosity/initiative at the other end.
It seems my attempt to show the larger context and situate it in actual psychological research has been of no avail though not for want of trying.
You and I aren't having the same conversation. You want to psychologize people's motivations, including my own, which is interesting to speculate about but off topic. I want to discuss the arguments made in the letter, the arguments that 25 Fields medalists actually signed on to.
I am capable of having a conversation with you on a great many topics. What you aren't capable of, apparently, is forcing me to want to have the one you want to have.
As far as calling names:
"Your comment is ... disingenuous."
"you are being disingenuously clueless or cluelessly disingenuous."
and now:
"I had imagined i was interacting with somebody who could understand the larger picture"
Nope, you need to engage in a root-cause conversation which is the key here. Just focusing on the words in a letter which as i already pointed out is couched in politically-correct terms due to etiquette is meaningless. There is a lot unsaid there which you have to tease-out by reading between the lines. It was written in response to OpenAI's behaviour (Tristan Buckmaster himself called what they did as "malpractice" in one of his tweets) but looking at the larger picture of AI in Mathematics. The key phrase from the letter is;
... Often these solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others. As in all creative professions, this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions. ...
The inference should be clear.
Hence we need to start with the underlying psychological motivations and then see how it explains observed behaviour. And it is not even complicated but somewhat obvious. The fact that you (many others) refuse to address this is why i question your (and theirs) motivations/agenda.
As regards your last few lines regarding "calling names" they are all only w.r.t. to the issues being discussed and are just rhetorical/descriptive judgements on your comments.
Fair enough. But I think you may be conflating an explanation with an excuse. I think your root cause analysis may be fruitful for explaining why they wrote the letter. But I don't think that it excuses what they actually wrote.
Shouldn't the AI companies know by now that all mathematical knowledge belongs to the mathematical community? Hopefully this letter knocks some sense into them.
Spot on. They now feel threatened that there's multiple challengers to their intellectual monopoly. This is their "whaaahhh... whaaahhhh... private company bad, now," but where OK when Halliburton, Boeing, General Dynamics, Monsanto, Open Society Foundation, Tides Foundation and many other shitty and scummy private and so-called "non-profit" entities were funding their shit. Now their entire business model is changing. Is not that it'll completely collapse, it's just changing and they are throwing a bitchy fit.
A lot of this was self inflicted by Florida. Between their roofing coverage laws and their attorney fee laws, suing for new roofs was basically free, so everyone and their dog did it.
“Nub City” is a nickname for Vernon, Florida where the residents ended up filing far more dismemberment insurance claims for amputated limbs than was statistically likely, the town of 500-800 people was the source of 2/3rds of the claims against the policies at one point. Insurance companies stopped writing dismemberment insurance policies in the area.
> Vernon gained infamy in the late 1950s and early 1960s due to the improbably high percentage of residents who made insurance claims for lost limbs, leading to an investigation of whether residents of the city were intentionally dismembering themselves for the insurance money. These insurance claims from Vernon, with a population of 500 to 800, accounted for as many as 2/3 of claims nationally, but there was no way of proving that any particular amputation was deliberate.[9] This led to Vernon being referred to as "nub city" during this period. In 1980, Errol Morris attempted to make a documentary about this phenomenon, but after being threatened by city residents and physically attacked by one, he changed the focus of the film, resulting in the 1981 documentary film Vernon, Florida.
“Free” if you won, meaning the insurer should have covered but refused and forced the insured to litigate, and part of the remedy was reimbursement of reasonable attorney fees. So, in other words, insurer at fault. That fostered a lively market of attorneys willing to take cases on contingency.
Of course, all that is in the past with the GOP legislature’s big changes to the statutes and DeSantis’s appointment of pro-insurer judges throughout the state.
Now, when Hurricane Paco does tear your roof off; soaks and destroys all your homelab Hoppers; and your insurer denies what should be a no-brainer claim because … well, just because it can, you often have to come out of pocket to pay a lawyer for the lengthy litigation — at precisely the time that you are probably even more cash-strapped than usual.
A lot of streaming platform listen minutes has always been this type of filler music. Until now, you could not really disambiguate intentional listening and filler listening. Now you can and the filler listeners wont even notice[1]. A huge chunk of the listen minutes whose value flowed to the artists (from a market perspective, technically this is inefficient), is now not going to go to them. Spotify will prompt optimise based on listening stats and perfect it. TBH until now, many artists were doing stream minutes optimisation of their pop music as well, this is kind of the logical conclusion of that. Human artists will have to stick to intentionally listened music, which is going to be a difficult competitive market. And most listeners actually don't care about this type of music to the same extent, measured in streaming minutes, so the market will be smaller as well. Popularity will end up mattering quite a bit more than it does today I suppose.
Example: This one is easily a replacement for people who listen to linkin park type music passively: https://elevenmusic.io/tracks/6aa1ca95740e34b282c33b0a Well except the vocal only pre-drop part, that was horrendous lyrical flow from the clanker.
The thing is thought that business seems quite happy with the AI prompting. Business has never paid a premium for slop vs knowledge when it is good enough.
The results of startups flouting laws though have been such that even when faced with determined opposition, in the end they are defeated. Airbnb and Uber ran roughshod over the law and faced determined taxi commissions and groups that usually beat real estate developers.
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