Actual scientists are not interested in using these tools to their full capability because of a fundamental psychological block where they have the need to feel superior to the LLM. The point is that AI labs have a thesis that AI will supersede humans in all cognitive work, and since few scientists have this view (or have the temperament to even contemplate this view), they have to do it themselves. In any case, they are attracting strong/talented biologists (Dario himself has a biology background) to work on this and provide their expertise, but presumably they filtered for scientists who are in fact "AI-pilled".
Look at what's happening in the math community- rather than excitedly embracing the power of AI's ability to generate new proofs, they are screaming for it to slow down (and quite a few want it simply stopped). Many scientists, even in ostensibly more real-world fields are broadly cut from the same cloth.
There may be a few scientists rejecting use of AI for that reason, but I would expect them to be a tiny minority, just as I would expect the number of developers who accept that AI is a powerful coding tool, but refuse to use it just because they want to feel superior, is very small!
A much more practical reason we're not yet seeing a lot of headline scientific mathematical breakthroughs is just that it is ungodly expensive! e.g. The Navier-Stokes result cost around $20M at API prices, and academics just don't have that kind of money to spend. You'll see more mathematical and scientific results from practitioners when either the cost of compute needed for these sort of brute force results is more in line with the size of academic grants, and/or the AI companies donate more compute to the scientific community.
There are different reactions from different mathematicians of course - Terrance Tao vs Cedric Villani, and no doubt a lot of shock at the speed of advance, but it seems the reasoned complaint why they don't want the AI companies themselves working on these problems is because the outcome is not the same - you get a result that in of itself may have been suspected or useless (Navier Stokes), but no write up of any new math or insights that were developed along the way, which is the real reason mathematics and people like Erdos pushed these famous problems in the first place - because they were expected to yield interesting mathematics, just as years of work on FLT had done. Imagine if instead of Wiles's work, and all that had gone before him, all we had was a $20M compute bill, hundreds of pages of impenetrable math, and a billion lines of Lean proving it was true?!
The author of the comment higher up is describing a person who is boycotting X because they are strongly against its stewardship and moderation but regardless continues to find ways to indulge themselves in the content produced by users of X, for other users of X.
How else should we describe the position held? It's clearly not entirely principled and veers directly into performative action (i.e. virtue signalling).
I admit I'm not nor have been a Twitter/X user so am able to look at the situation without a sense of entitlement or attachment.
> The author of the comment higher up is describing a person who is boycotting X because they are strongly against its stewardship and moderation but regardless continues to find ways to indulge themselves in the content produced by users of X, for other users of X.
Yes. Because we have to participate in a society in which sometimes, that's where the info is. Some towns only post their announcements on Facebook/X! Some people prominent on my framework of choice are only on X.
> How else should we describe the position held? It's clearly not entirely principled and veers directly into performative action (i.e. virtue signalling).
Virtue isn't a binary. I can reduce my externalities, even if I can't eliminate them.
No idea how it looks right now, but at some point Twitter started to block reading replies without an account. And sometimes it blocked even more, so you could not follow links to read.
actually I think the whole point is we're finding that the chess analogy to math is in fact quite apt. Math is just an extremely complex game. Its rules can be written down and there are win conditions. It's really not far fetched to think that through information theory, a reasonable measure of depth and beauty to a definition or conjecture can be defined. Then the game is simply to maximize the number of such artifacts produced of high depth and beauty along with proofs of the relevant conjectures.
Philosophers I'm sure can debate this back and forth but it seems probable that some things we thought were ineffable are in fact quantifiable to a degree, and now we have the technology and the machines to bring that to the logical conclusion.
lol right. The nonchalance in referring to taxi/bus driver jobs.
Remember when we all said it's a good thing when the coal mining jobs are going away and that they should all just learn to code? Maybe a little more of that energy right now.
for many fairly strong mathematicians, the career calculus is fame and status (mild though it may be) through mathematics or anonymity but financial reward in tech or finance. Yes, clout by becoming a lifelong academic is in fact rational for some and part of their motivation. Of course they really like what they do as well, but earning the respect of the peers they know are also respected by a large swathe of society is very important.
I guess that type of “clout” feels different to me.
Wanting to be validated by peers for your talents in a niche field vs. using millions to try to solve a math problem that you don’t really care about with AI to market the gigantic company you work for.
That fairly insular community pretty much gave up on commercial success in order to be insular. But the commercial forces were not happy being commercially successful, so they decided to disturb even their insular and commercially-unviable activities.
sounds a bit like cope. Crouzeix's conjecture was solved exactly under these circumstances and I wouldn't describe it as "not that valuable". In any case, AI capabilities will increase dramatically over the next few years while human math capability will not. That means that there's a fixed target regarding whatever is currently considered a "serious math problem" and its difficulty level. Soon the average problem solved with a few hundred dollars of compute will be at that bar.
I actually partially disagree with this. What happened to all the excitement about Intelligence Augmentation (IA)? Now it's AI instead of IA. I think there's so much untapped potential for augmenting our intellect with the likes of https://dynamicland.org and https://folk.computer, as well as the work that's been going on in college math education, things like Lean, etc. I think the only reason human math capabilities haven't expanded that much is a failure of our imagination, not our potential.
your questioning made it sound abnormal. If this conversation were about Kobe Bryant and someone used "Kobe" to refer to him, would you have made your comment? Pretty clearly your criticism of parasociality doesn't have much bite if everyone is parasocial.
While I think calling a basketball player by their first name is parasocial and lame, it doesn't compare to calling a white supremacist by their first name. That's just twisted.
Look at what's happening in the math community- rather than excitedly embracing the power of AI's ability to generate new proofs, they are screaming for it to slow down (and quite a few want it simply stopped). Many scientists, even in ostensibly more real-world fields are broadly cut from the same cloth.
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