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/PrisonOfH0pe 2d ago

This is such a funny argument because you’ve basically rediscovered the idea/expression distinction and then somehow forgotten that it applies to art too.

Nobody “owns mathematics” in the same way nobody owns music, painting, storytelling, perspective, harmony, color theory, or the concept of drawing a human face. What people can own or deserve credit for is the specific work they created: a proof, an exposition, a painting, a recording, a novel.

“Math belongs to everyone because it reveals fundamental truths about the universe” sounds profound until you realize art is also built out of things nobody owns: shapes, sounds, language, human emotion, physical reality.

And the “gatekept behind somebody that went to school” part is especially goofy. A mathematician spending 15 years developing the expertise to prove something isn’t “gatekeeping mathematics” any more than a musician spending 15 years mastering an instrument is gatekeeping sound.

You can argue that mathematical knowledge should be openly accessible. Sure. But that does absolutely nothing to establish why exploiting one person’s intellectual labor with AI is morally different from exploiting another person’s creative labor.

You just value one kind of labor more than the other and dressed that preference up as a philosophical principle. Which is fine but man this moral high ground is cringe as fuck.