Don’t bother. This is the third or fourth time AI has solved an open conjecture, and once again the comment sections everywhere are full of people explaining how this doesn’t really matter at all, how it’s an irrelevant, obscure problem, how any mediocre grad student could probably have solved it if only they had bothered to try, and how of course, human mathematicians will still be vastly superior to machines 100 years from now because they have that magic spark for which nobody can say what it supposedly consists of.
These discussions have nothing to do with mathematics, and everything to do with ego and fear. I’ve never been less impressed with humans than since AI started challenging them.
> Just because they published it doesn't mean that others haven't already discovered it.
That’s irrelevant for the moral evaluation. Everyone is responsible for their own actions. If you choose not to kill anyone it won’t stop others from killing. But the fact that this is so doesn’t give you a license to kill.
And I have yet to see a single paper like this where a researcher bails out and publicly says they refuse to work on such projects. Not one.
The most benign interpretation of this observation is that science is filled with spineless opportunists who don’t care who they hurt with what they create. A slightly less benign interpretation might be that many of these people are doing this deliberately, and getting off on the sense of power it gives them.
The difference between today and 30 years ago is that if you are an individual developer, you are at the complete mercy of a single company (Valve), who can force you to do essentially anything they want for the privilege of publishing on their platform, with no meaningful alternative, and zero recourse if they say “no”.
You could (e.g. by replacing residual-dependent expert routing with hardcoded logic), but quality will suffer dramatically. It’s far better to use a similar-sized dense model then.
No, I’m talking about an article I saw maybe 10-12 months ago on a major news site, perhaps The Guardian.
Individual reports of scientists leaving are meaningless without overall statistics. If there is a net outflow of scientists from the US, I’m not aware of it, and I certainly haven’t seen any actual statistical evidence for it.
I’ve seen titles like “Why top scientists are leaving the United States” where the article itself talked about A SINGLE RESEARCHER relocating to France.
It both works and fails, like many other things. But if you hold the goal that it must never fail in sufficiently high esteem, you invariably end up with a system like the one we have now.
It’s not accurate, it’s absurd hyperbole no different from the kind the people who peddle it have arrogantly ridiculed their entire lives.
A mentally unstable person being “made” to do something by a chatbot is no different from other mentally unstable people doing bad things because they saw them in a TV show.
Absolutely, and the claim is somewhere between nonsense and pedantry bordering on nonsense.
The exact same thing is true for, say, Signal. The provider delivers the client, and they aggressively block non-official clients from participating. So the “ends” in end-to-end are ultimately controlled by Signal. But as long as you trust the Signal company not to insert a backdoor into your client, it’s still true that the company can’t read your texts.
> now there is an upgrade ai agent for something that should just be ticking up a version number.
If a component as basic as a button or a list view ever requires an “upgrade”, something is fundamentally wrong to begin with. HTML5, ARIA, etc. aren’t cutting edge technologies that the ecosystem still needs time to figure out. This should be pull once and forget.
Debating is always primarily a game of power and only secondarily about truth or correctness. If it were about truth alone, the person who is right could be content with being right and not caring what others believe, just like they don’t care about 99.9999% of beliefs held by others either.
But it’s not about truth, it’s about imposing your beliefs on others. And while rational arguments are a socially blessed method for doing so, they don’t change the underlying motivation.
Many, if not most, historical institutions that are universally recognized as slavery didn’t permit slave owners to dispose of their slaves like arbitrary property they owned. If that’s the definition of slavery, it’s an unusually restrictive one.
The analogy doesn’t quite work because it’s not clear whether LLMs actually need additional mediocre-quality, human-written explanations in order to improve, or whether better training pipelines and ingesting documentation might be enough.
These discussions have nothing to do with mathematics, and everything to do with ego and fear. I’ve never been less impressed with humans than since AI started challenging them.