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Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?

293 points · 384 comments · auggierose

  1. vatsachak · · focus · HN ↗
    Why is Terry Tao even talking these arguments when all OpenAI did was a sophisticated brute force search with LLMs?

    Give them Navier-Stokes in a vacuum

    1. unsupp0rted · · focus · HN ↗
      Same reason Gary Kasparov and Lee Sedol started their morning in one universe and ended their evening in another.

      Brute Force or not, the game is being played and won without them all of a sudden, and even worse: at a level of output far beyond them

      1. vatsachak · · focus · HN ↗
        No it's not though. Can OpenAI prove Navier-Stokes from a vacuum with no human knowledge?
        1. gjm11 · · focus · HN ↗
          Can a human?

          (Evidently not, since humans hadn't managed to do it even with the entirety of human knowledge available to them.)

          1. vatsachak · · focus · HN ↗
            They used an agent swarm. Could humanity? Of course; it was close to being solved. It might have taken five years
            1. gjm11 · · focus · HN ↗
              The question you asked was whether the AIs could prove the thing "in a vacuum", without making any use of previous human work. "Close to being solved" is a statement about all the previous human work that mathematicians might have used to do it in five years.
        2. red75prime · · focus · HN ↗
          Replication of the development of mathematics by human civilization is a task for an artificial hyperintelligence.
          1. jambalaya8 · · focus · HN ↗
            What will anyone do? What will anyone feel their purpose would be? Can't all have the same one, either.

            What will the planet 'need' homo sapiens for (arguably it never needed homo sapiens at all)?

            Would anyone's time or life really have significant value?

            1. red75prime · · focus · HN ↗
              I didn't mean that as "we need hyper-intelligence." I mean that going all the way from nothing to singular, dual, plural grammatical numbers attached to particular nouns to abstract one, two, three, many to zero, one, two, three... to rationals to... is a very long way.
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