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Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter

286 points · 412 comments · simianwords

  1. fruitl00p · · focus · HN ↗
    I thought one of the implicit points of the open letter was that unsolved problems are not something that falls out of the sky, they are a curated resource that people have spent time on and shared for the benefit of like-minded peers and humanity as a whole. And the AI companies treat them like they treat absolutely everything else: natural resources, literature, art, code etc. as something to be chucked into the ravening maw and pooped out the back as profit. They don't care if mathematics advances, they don't care if they strip-mine the available problems and damage the field. In fact, as with programming I think they see that as in their long-term interest - soon there will be no intelligence or creativity but the one that Sam Altman bills you for.
    1. junofan · · focus · HN ↗
      Yes, and here towards the bottom the author gets to the reason he didn’t sign with the other medalists:

      > I felt that there was nothing to be gained from criticizing AI companies for generating too many solutions too quickly.

      > Under the circumstances, I think the best we can do is recognise the changes that are coming and try to work out the least unsatisfactory way of dealing with them.

      Basically let’s make it a short-term problem and deal with it. Groups of people can deal with short term emergencies. Don’t turn it into a structural issue.

      And in my view what’s the alternative in the letter exactly? The tools exist. Is there going to be drama every time somebody decides to use them?

      1. fruitl00p · · focus · HN ↗
        Well I think in response to 'what are you going to do', what people are probably going to do is stop sharing on-going work, stop bothering to curate problems that are just going to inflate someone's IPO valuation, basically accelerating the tragedy of the commons that the AI companies are driving.
        1. NonHyloMorph · · focus · HN ↗
          Seems legit. I speculate their are emergent mechanisms for the development of memory that are not dependent on what ever mechanism is behind the "improve $model for 'everyone'"*

          Is someone knowlegeable on research that engages the question on the development of something that could be considered as some emergent mechanism of memory, that is independent of instances and their contextwindow an specifically also independent of the use of conversations for trainingsdata?

          *(This is regarding the value of selfhosted models - maybe small selforganisations that share ressources to do though to do so? Generally the value of machine learning seems to be to big to reject)

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