pelican0

And yes, there should be an appropriate law response to the hacking incidents. If for nothing else, to 1) not set precedent of inaction, and 2) get full logs of what happened instead of relying on the labs' "kindness" to offer the information they want.

But also, the agents absolutely went rogue.

Anyone skeptical should go read the METR report [0].

The Hugging Face hacking incident was a shot across the bow. And in hindsight possibly the best thing to have happened in this era. If their security was tight enough, we would still be in the dark. So we (outsiders) should rejoice that it wasn't, that one time.

We can push for accountability for the labs, while also not be in denial of the power and nature of the new models.

But the "convex hull" idea always came across as wishful thinking and hand-wavy pseudo-science to me.

Here's a rebuttal [0] of it from Tim Gowers (uses another math metaphor, but still clear and the whole thread is worth a read):

>...the popularity of the idea that AI "merely explores the convex hull" mystifies me. Why wouldn't it be more like the subgroup generated by existing mathematical knowledge? (That's also a metaphor -- I'm not saying there's a group structure.)

>The convex hull metaphor suggests that AI isn't having radically new ideas and will eventually run out of things to do, whereas the group metaphor suggests the possibility of building up in small steps to something well beyond what you started with, with no obvious limit.

Yes, the situation sucks overall and mathematics as a whole is in a turbulent time now.

But it also sucks when mathematicians, who are considered experts on a particular problem, refuse to engage with breakthrough results about that problem. #2 above is still true regardless of where it came from or how hard it can be to absorb.

While reading "The Mathocalypse" post [0] by Scott Aaronson, Scott described his wife Dana's reaction to one of the newly solved results in her primary domain of expertise, on which she'd been working for decades.

After her initial shock, and annoyance with the format/style, she decided to start using Astra - for the first time - to help her understand the new result. And he reported in the comments that she had made a lot of progress understanding it in one day, and may be even excited to give a talk about it!

That seems like a much healthier attitude towards these new results.

Yes, everything else sucks about this messy period. But there are still diamonds (in the rough) in this drop that perhaps should be looked into. If the author is too busy, perhaps one of their students can take a look? Someone will, eventually.