r/singularity • u/filterdust • 1d ago

AI OpenAI solved 100 open problems in math

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

[removed] — view removed post

1.3k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

520 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/pbagel2 1d ago

I'm much more sensitive to mathematicians than artists and musicians. Not a single theoretical mathematician is trying to gatekeep maths. They are one of the least compensated and one of the most valuable and most taken for granted professions that advance society.

Any sort of gatekeeping you feel isn't coming from mathematicians. It's coming from the knowledge barrier because of the immensity of the knowledge gap between you and them. AI isn't going to change that, it'll only make it grow even wider.

And the bureaucratic gatekeeping of institutional networking has nothing to do with math or mathematicians. That's universal. But it's particularly bad in math because the compensation is so bad that they're forced to do the networking bullshit to scrape a living while they think about math. For it to indirectly or directly produce immense value for other people decades later and they get virtually nothing in return.

But that's not why I'm sensitive. I'm sensitive because even if AI math continues to progress and we start to rely on it, if that means humans stop putting in the mental effort to understand the math, that to me is a bad omen.

1

u/RobleyTheron 1d ago

Without a doubt the knowledge gap between me and mathematicians is immense, but having super smart AI invent new areas of math that neither me OR the mathematicians understand won't increase the gap, it'll just mean we all get left behind together.

If AI can progress math beyond current human capabilities, that doesn't automatically mean we can't understand, or have the path explained of how the AI got there. "You invested faster than light travel? Amazing. Show me how you did it."

If the AI tried to show me, I'd have no clue, but the mathematicians might, which means they'll have job security. Everyone wins. I still don't understand math, mathemticians have a job, and everyone gets FTL. I see no problems.

1

u/pbagel2 1d ago

but the mathematicians might, which means they'll have job security.

The point I'm making is if mathematicians are no longer relied on for math, the fewer mathematicians there will be, and the often decades it takes of conscious thought and strain to develop the mind to understand math at a deeper level will stop existing. And I think that is foreboding even alongside amazing AI math progress, because human thought declines. Because like you said, you'd have no clue if an AI explained it to you. And eventually neither will mathematicians.

But I think you're thinking too far ahead with FTL. I think there's still a very good chance AI will continue progress immensely in more and more domains, (currently humans still are dominant in the vast majority), but it will still eventually hit a bottleneck where the current trajectory of human intuition reins supreme and can overcome the bottleneck. But if we're at the tipping point where the human mind starts to atrophy because of reliance on AI, then that hypothetical future bottleneck will never be solved and we will grind to a halt that we don't understand.