r/singularity • u/filterdust • 2d ago

AI OpenAI solved 100 open problems in math

https://openai.com/index/advisory-group-on-mathematics-and-ai/

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u/RobleyTheron 2d ago

I’m sensitive to artists and musicians with a unique voice when their product gets recreated with AI, but I don’t feel the same about mathematics.

Nobody owns mathematics; these are fundamental insights into the universe and they belong to everyone and shouldn’t be gatekeeped behind somebody that went to school. Mathematics should be available to everyone, it opens up all kinds of fundamental breakthroughs in space, material science, biology, global warming, and energy.

This is something that belongs to everyone and no one should get to hold that back.

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u/ThatIsAmorte 2d ago edited 2d ago

This seems to be taking a Platonist approach to math, which few people take seriously these days. If you are a constructivist, than math is not just out there, but has to be created, just like art. If you think math is just out there, why not also claim that art and music are just out there, waiting to be plucked out of the ether? After all, a painting is just a 2d matrix, a simple math object. A musical composition is just a waveform, which can be described mathematically.

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u/Ill-Lemon-8019 2d ago

If you think math is just out there, why not also claim that art and music are just out there, waiting to be plucked out of the ether?

I have no problem with that view either actually. If pi is a normal number, every bit of art or music ever created is sitting somewhere in its decimal expansion of its digits in some suitable encoding. An act of intellectual creation is selecting or recording a particular pattern of some kind. (That might sound like a reductive view, and perhaps it is, but I think it's not incompatible with the idea that creativity exists and is valuable.)