youoy

Whatever doesnt count as maths is just not maths. Its just carrying out instructions to get some "gain".

Other people usually care only about "gain", its their only motivation. Non "gain" results are just happy accidents.

And "gain" (once you have your survival covered) is just an invented abstraction with 0 real meaning. But people try to convince themselfs that it has meaning.

This goes back to the classic story for "kids" about the emperor that has no clothes.

I would want to hire a plumber that does both, because his/her solution would be better and higher quality 100% of the times.

The question is if Godel matters in practice, or if its is just a limiting behaviour with infinite resources

This is not at all what mathematitians are saying. They say LLMs obfuscate proofs even more. Saying that mathematitians obscure proofs is nonsense. Maths requieres a big effort from the brain to be deobfuscated as you say, and deobfuscating maths requires understanding, which takes even longer. Thats why textbooks dont exist just after a new proof appears, it takes some time to digest it and identify the key parts.

Maths is a language, and learning a language takes time. Its like if I say that japanese made an effort to obfuscate their language just because i cannot read it or read it as fast as english.

LLMs are autimating some part of maths which is formal manipulation. It happens that computers are much better than humans at formal manipulation. In the same way that computers are much better at mathematical computations. That is the huge change in the field. But any working mathematitian can tell you that formal manipulation is just part of the research job.

The powerfull thing about maths is that formal manipulation has allowed humans to go further "for free": you just need to understand the foundations, and the formal system allows you to compute new results for free without needing to reunderstand them.

I was thinking more about dictatorships that block the entry of outside knowledge into the population for example, because its not useful to their goals (which is a particular shape of what economic value is for them). But you dont have to go that far away, you can just see the difference between democratic cultures that value at different levels those fields. In the end "economic value" is less objective than what it seams.

I dont get this. What is the difference if you replace "AI" by "Tao"? And people still were doing math.

I get HN is a Software site. But all math posts are invaded by people that think Math=Software. Probably based on the way they were taught maths when they were young.

Why would a theoretical physicist spend 30 years developing a theory that could be made false by a new experiment with a new technology? Was Newton gravitation worth if einstein was going to come later?

We are heading directly into a world where people forget about what values, philosophy, poetry, math, physics, or any other "non economically valuable" things are. And we all know what happened any other times in history when that happened.

The main issue here is that people that are able to "Strong disagree" is shrinking with every model release, because it requires skills. So it will get more difficult to get funding.

You may say "hey, before AI people payed for math salaries even though they didnt understand the math or the economic outcome". But the issue is there are now "mathematitians" trying to convince not to fund.

In this new reality, you will get "mathematitians" trying to convince that only AI maths matter. And on the other side someone speaking about "understanding", "taste", "community". And the people deciding to fund dont have the skills to differentiate. So they will fund the AI boosters with a higher probability.

Thats how the job of professional mathematitian dissapears. By being replaced by something that on the surface looks similar, but its just an ugly copy.

I guess this AI wave will divide the population more between people that think that only economic value exists, and people that dont.

Thats one of the timeless human debates.

We are now living in the perfect combo of low morality and general human automation. So i expect the next few decades dominated by people who think (and have a "proof") that doing something without an expected economic gain is useless.

I know that is the whole point. But i may dream of being as tall as a house, but it does not matter how hard i dream, it wont happen.

In my experience, every new model release allows me to go further, although every time i see every time the limitations, and i identify where i add value. And this value gets bigger every time.

But on the other hand, every model release reduces the amount of people that are able to value this "added value", because it requires more skills.

So we have the paradox that the added value i can bring on top gets bigger and bigger, but the perception of the economic value for the majority of the population gets smaller.

Can we please stop reducing human activity to "taste", conferences, talks, "understanding"? I think this is a very unproductive trap.

There is a world where we get to the edge of AI capabilities, and we build on top of that. As humans have always done with every new technology.

There is another more pessimistic view where LLMs just replace every human capability, and our economic overlords dont need us for anything and we just eat the small pieces of bread that are left.

This comes down to the fact of:

is human existence/intelligence just the simbolic representations we make in our brain? Or are they just a tool?

I tend to think of Godels incompleteness theorem as a proof that on the limit LLMs are useless. The real question for me is at what point approaching this limit becomes an issue, and if it has any practical consequences.

For me this path means that our role as humans is just the understanding of intelligence?

Everything else is secondary (or the last of our priorities) and would be better automated?

This is a hard pill to swallow

Come on, they were working on this for more than 2 months. Dont fall for the corporate half truths.

Dont get me wrong, i am 100% impressed by the technical capabilities, and appreciate the significance, and the amount of the results. This is a very special time to be alive, never in my dreams i would have thought to see this.

To follow your methaphore, who is directing the spaceship?

This feels more like fireworks than a space launch. Space launches would not have happened without having fireworks first of course, but I am looking forward for the space launch moment.

What is the average value of humanities when the default is to write things with LLMs ? The same with maths.

Sshhh dont say it out loud, someone might hear you.