> we ask them to stop testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary models.
Maybe I'm alone on this, but for some reason these sorts of requests strike me as akin to gatekeeping how someone should breathe air. It's math... the numbers and symbols are just out there in the platonic realm available for anyone to do as they like with them. It's patently absurd to request other people to stop.
Ensuring credit where credit is due? That's fine. If your model incorporates the efforts of many others, then it's reasonable to request acknowledgement of everyone who contributed (even indirectly). But that's not what the request states — presumably their ask subsumes any advanced ML model, including those that weren't trained on a giant corpus of text.
I don't see why mathematicians should be protected from AI anymore than any other profession. It's either everybody or nobody, not fair on the face of it otherwise.
TFA isn't asking for mathematicians to be protected from AI. It's asking AI labs to hold themselves to the standards of the mathematical community:
- releasing papers using the normal process to allow peer review
- giving talks etc to disseminate knowledge so humans understand the result
- writing papers in a way (standard terminology etc) that allows mathematicians to digest the result (some AI math papers comprise a huge verbose load of non-standard terminology and waffle and then a massive lean proof. This is very hard for humans to actually understand, and means it's hard for others to take the work forward.)
- giving appropriate credit to results that are used to derive the work
It includes some specific recommendations for situations where the person prompting the model is not in a position to understand the output, and frankly these are really welcome given situations like the recent case at Anthropic where a non-mathematician at Anthropic prompted claude to make a significant improvement to the bounds of a problem related to the Riemann Zeta function[1] which led to widespread misreporting and claims (not by Anthropic themselves notably) that the Riemann hypothesis itself had been proved, which is emphatically not the case.
Research mathematics is fundamentally a collaborative activity and the way in which some of these results are released is done to maximise PR but means a ton of the mathematical value is left on the table.
[1] <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/research/riemann-zeta" rel="nofollow">https://www.anthropic.com/research/riemann-zeta. As I understand it, the Riemann Hypothesis says that all non-trivial zeroes of the zeta function lie on a line called the critical line. Two centuries of previous work had established that at least something like 40.9% of the zeroes lie on the line and noone has ever found a non-trivial zero that does not lie on that line. Claude (with prompting from a non-mathematician to "try harder" etc) improved this bound massively to 67%. Now a lot of people said things like "OK so all we've got to do is to improve that to 100% and we've proved the RH", which is definitely not true unfortunately, because you can say that in the limit the proportion of the zeroes on the line is 100% and still have infinitely many which are not.
> - releasing papers using the normal process to allow peer review
I'm not an academic but I've heard enough stories about how this can very much act as gatekeeping that I don't think it is a good request.
Is “gate keeping” a new toy for ai bros or something? Peer review has a purpose… You guys should try to understand systems before you celebrate their death.
I freely admit I am not an academic. I just note that there is a lot of negative sentiment about people trying to get stuff published, and a lot of it looks from an external perspective to be elitist gatekeeping.
Please read that again, I am not on the inside here, so anything I say is just based on reading stuff from aspiring academics and articles in that mode. To my amateur eyes, there seems to be a problem in the academic world, of some sort, but how big it is, or isn't, I don't know.
Is that ok?
So, assume I, a complete amateur, no PhD, no connections or academic record to speak of (I have an MSc only, from the 90s, in a third world country) thinks I've discovered something, how do I go about "publishing"?
To me, I could easily see value where I self publish somewhere, where other similar non-connected people can see, crowd source the verification (basically peer review) and if it turns out to be useful, it'll be used.
Maybe it would be easy for me to get it formally published, but I doubt it.
First of all if you think you had discovered something in a pre-AI world, there’s a 99% chance it’s some triviality or wrong. Mathematics is extremely rich and people spend their entire lives thinking about it. Undergrads can’t comprehend what the grad students are studying. Grad students can’t comprehend what the post docs are doing. And it just goes and goes.
In a post-AI world there’s a mountain of high quality work being published by people who actually know what’s going on. You can probably make a discovery with chatgpt right now, but why should someone who’s got a ton of things to do already read your article? You’re free to put it online, but why should you be free to force someone to read something?
Second of all, it’s extremely aggravating to read all these software people criticizing mathematicians, who almost universally have low salaries and who chose to go into this profession because they care about contributing to human knowledge.
>In a post-AI world there’s a mountain of high quality work being published by people who actually know what’s going on. You can probably make a discovery with chatgpt right now, but why should someone who’s got a ton of things to do already read your article? You’re free to put it online, but why should you be free to force someone to read something?
But aren't you literally just proving what I'm saying? The original argument was that everyone should have to post through peer reviewed journals, I said that is probably gatekeeping too far, and your response above just confirms my suspicions.
> Second of all, it’s extremely aggravating to read all these software people criticizing mathematicians, who almost universally have low salaries and who chose to go into this profession because they care about contributing to human knowledge.
I probably agree with you, except I have never and am not criticising mathematicians. I am only saying that there are quite a lot of reports around that the academic world is fierce and that sometimes there are high barriers to getting something recognised.
No idea if it is true or not, but my personal opinion is that it isn't going to matter much in the future. If it exists, then people will work around any gatekeeping.
throwaway713 · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe I'm alone on this, but for some reason these sorts of requests strike me as akin to gatekeeping how someone should breathe air. It's math... the numbers and symbols are just out there in the platonic realm available for anyone to do as they like with them. It's patently absurd to request other people to stop.
Ensuring credit where credit is due? That's fine. If your model incorporates the efforts of many others, then it's reasonable to request acknowledgement of everyone who contributed (even indirectly). But that's not what the request states — presumably their ask subsumes any advanced ML model, including those that weren't trained on a giant corpus of text.
knuckleheads · · focus · HN ↗
seanhunter · · focus · HN ↗
- releasing papers using the normal process to allow peer review
- giving talks etc to disseminate knowledge so humans understand the result
- writing papers in a way (standard terminology etc) that allows mathematicians to digest the result (some AI math papers comprise a huge verbose load of non-standard terminology and waffle and then a massive lean proof. This is very hard for humans to actually understand, and means it's hard for others to take the work forward.)
- giving appropriate credit to results that are used to derive the work
It includes some specific recommendations for situations where the person prompting the model is not in a position to understand the output, and frankly these are really welcome given situations like the recent case at Anthropic where a non-mathematician at Anthropic prompted claude to make a significant improvement to the bounds of a problem related to the Riemann Zeta function[1] which led to widespread misreporting and claims (not by Anthropic themselves notably) that the Riemann hypothesis itself had been proved, which is emphatically not the case.
Research mathematics is fundamentally a collaborative activity and the way in which some of these results are released is done to maximise PR but means a ton of the mathematical value is left on the table.
[1] <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/research/riemann-zeta" rel="nofollow">https://www.anthropic.com/research/riemann-zeta. As I understand it, the Riemann Hypothesis says that all non-trivial zeroes of the zeta function lie on a line called the critical line. Two centuries of previous work had established that at least something like 40.9% of the zeroes lie on the line and noone has ever found a non-trivial zero that does not lie on that line. Claude (with prompting from a non-mathematician to "try harder" etc) improved this bound massively to 67%. Now a lot of people said things like "OK so all we've got to do is to improve that to 100% and we've proved the RH", which is definitely not true unfortunately, because you can say that in the limit the proportion of the zeroes on the line is 100% and still have infinitely many which are not.
munksbeer · · focus · HN ↗
> - releasing papers using the normal process to allow peer review
I'm not an academic but I've heard enough stories about how this can very much act as gatekeeping that I don't think it is a good request.
GPerson · · focus · HN ↗
munksbeer · · focus · HN ↗
Please read that again, I am not on the inside here, so anything I say is just based on reading stuff from aspiring academics and articles in that mode. To my amateur eyes, there seems to be a problem in the academic world, of some sort, but how big it is, or isn't, I don't know.
Is that ok?
So, assume I, a complete amateur, no PhD, no connections or academic record to speak of (I have an MSc only, from the 90s, in a third world country) thinks I've discovered something, how do I go about "publishing"?
To me, I could easily see value where I self publish somewhere, where other similar non-connected people can see, crowd source the verification (basically peer review) and if it turns out to be useful, it'll be used.
Maybe it would be easy for me to get it formally published, but I doubt it.
GPerson · · focus · HN ↗
In a post-AI world there’s a mountain of high quality work being published by people who actually know what’s going on. You can probably make a discovery with chatgpt right now, but why should someone who’s got a ton of things to do already read your article? You’re free to put it online, but why should you be free to force someone to read something?
Second of all, it’s extremely aggravating to read all these software people criticizing mathematicians, who almost universally have low salaries and who chose to go into this profession because they care about contributing to human knowledge.
munksbeer · · focus · HN ↗
But aren't you literally just proving what I'm saying? The original argument was that everyone should have to post through peer reviewed journals, I said that is probably gatekeeping too far, and your response above just confirms my suspicions.
> Second of all, it’s extremely aggravating to read all these software people criticizing mathematicians, who almost universally have low salaries and who chose to go into this profession because they care about contributing to human knowledge.
I probably agree with you, except I have never and am not criticising mathematicians. I am only saying that there are quite a lot of reports around that the academic world is fierce and that sometimes there are high barriers to getting something recognised.
No idea if it is true or not, but my personal opinion is that it isn't going to matter much in the future. If it exists, then people will work around any gatekeeping.