I think a lot about how Terrence Tao and the usual 30 (already well-funded) math guys will receive this cash while us early-career math students are left holding the bag.
It's akin somewhat to "donating 100 dollars to the node JS foundation, not the packages that appear when you run npm fund".
As much as this looks like a math problem, it's actually an everyone problem. Some hands-on (literally) have more way to go, but otherwise this is a "hop" that the entire society needs to cross. Honestly, I don't think there's going to be be any Math 2.0 as there won't be any other 2.0, at least not in any utilitarian way and the effort to find utility where there's none is misguided at best. The analogy I like to make is that with horses trying to find utility y in the Ford era.
It's also not an OpenAI, Anthropic or any specific name caused problem. This type of progress has always been happening, it's more or less coincidental (like Stigler's law). The problem though is we need to rethink how we operate as a society and too few (IMO) are trying to make this conversation happen.
That also means that you will need buy-in from a plurality/majority of that society to make that "hop". This is not going to break politically this election cycle, but it will show up. Barring a 2008 level event, it will likely be the issue with the greatest growth heading into 2028, and that will place the impetus on the "specific name"s to communicate how this isn't just trickle down benefits. Especially when it will be an easy sell to people that the "hop" means real people falling into the gap or getting left behind. They need to figure out a way to make the distribution of benefits more immediate and tangible to everyday folks, because the perception of the distributed costs is a very easy sell in this political environment, regardless of the reality. I can't imagine that getting better over the next two years.
You cannot use mathematics without understanding it.
It doesn't help you that AI understands it, when you don't. You are the one getting screwed over by others who understand statistics better than you do.
When you're rich enough, you can pay others (or AI) to protect you. But then you're dependent upon them.
So, under a transactional model of social relationships, you are in an arms race over raw intelligence and competency/data. With only one winner, who takes all in the end.
Logically, most people have already lost in that game, so why keep playing that nonsense?
No, it's not an "everyone" problem yet. Each field is likely on its own timeline. Knowing how well AI is at proving theorems is of only limited use for predicting what will happen and when in other fields.
too few are talking about reshaping society because those in power are not letting that happen. the amount of wealth concentrated at the top is staggering and allows them to fortify their position by bribing, buying governments and media.
I love how "society" is investing billions to develop a tech that makes its own citizens obsolete, but doesn't manage to provide basic healthcare, housing or infrastructure...
Once the citizens are made obsolete, there is no need for healthcare, housing, or (human) infrastructure. Just electricity, cooling water, and Internet connectivity.
That why our ancestors repurposed their pitchforks. History is marked by a drive towards inequality, punctuated by bouts of war and revolution that trigger a reset.
Maybe you get conditioned on how the rich usually treats other people, but this view isn't well supported by healthy discussions among the math community wrt recent AI 'disruption'
> > Under a partnership, the Simons Foundation, Anthropic and OpenAI will commit $15 million in combined funding and resources.
OAI and Ant got blowback for essentially strip mining mathematical discoveries into PR wins for their models, accidentally laying waste to the research field in process. Throwing ~$5M each into PR whitewashing (partially in token credits), seems self-serving.
Kudos to the Simons Foundation for seizing the moment to offer the labs a fig leaf of respectability. Might have been the fastest "Yes" on a grant proposal ever.
Ironically, that has been that way for most people since forever.
Comparing with the situation in programming, where code evaluation (obviously analogous to "understanding") is that bottleneck now, should get people the idea of being in the same boat.
> Under a partnership, the Simons Foundation, Anthropic and OpenAI will commit $15 million in combined funding and resources. The foundation will manage and award the funding, including through an open call for proposals, to support workshops and initiatives that help researchers evaluate recent AI-assisted results, learn and use new tools, share perspectives and shape collective standards for AI use.
The foundation was started in 1994, Wikipedia says "one of the largest charitable organizations in the United States with assets of over $5 billion in 2022" - Jim Simons founded the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund.
Simons Foundation also significantly funds arXiv, and also a large number of specific grants across maths and sciences. I don't think there's much agenda here.
So charitable that it launches this initiative with ClosedAI and Misanthropic. There are probably accelerationist and transhumanist nutcases at this foundation.
Can you ever look behind the surface of ... anything at all? Only naive and childlike statements in favor of AI proponents. It is literally like saying: "Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson are esteemed members of the magnanimous and generous Royal Family."
Wonder if they realize these types of things help grow massive resentment against such companies? I'm astounded by how terrible the politics of SV actually is.
how is that different than what's been happening forever? Mathematics has ALWAYS been a "charity". The only thing that changes over time is who gives the money, first it's the church, then it's princes, then government, it's been corporations for a while, this is nothing new.
In some way, yes. The whole situation seems completely grounded in that mathematicians are greedy for status and clout trying to write their name on new discoveries in blood and publish as many papers as possible. And now they are sad because they lost their way to this status.
When you remove this greed and status seeking you might actually end up with a healthy environment.
I don’t think it’s a matter of greed. I’d say it’s about incentives. In every field, people want to progress. I don’t think mathematicians are any different, even though we try to admire and idealize higher principles and the pursuit of knowledge. If you don’t publish papers under your name, you won’t progress in your career or receive enough support to work at the frontier. It’s just a general observation.
It may be true in some cases but as a blanket condemnation of the entire field it makes no sense. Moreover, I can't fathom how you could reach this conclusion if you've actually done any reading on "the whole situation." The reality is precisely the opposite of what you're claiming.
Mathematicians are upset partly because AI companies are "scooping" their work. If you had worked on something for years and this happened, you'd be upset, too. The manner in which this happened with Navier-Stokes was unconscionable. The mathematicians who did the work deserve recognition. OpenAI deliberately stole it from them.
More importantly, the purpose of mathematics isn't to produce proofs. It's to produce mathematics and mathematicians. Working through problems helps people find new mathematics -- and makes people mathematicians. A machine that generates proofs destroys that. It breaks the cycle that makes mathematics fruitful, interesting, and not just self-regenerative but self-propagating.
AI companies aren't just clear-cutting the fields of math; they're sowing them with salt -- and they're doing this precisely because of greed and hunger for status and the title of "first."
Unhinged and honestly nauseating take. Were you hurt by a mathematician at some point? I don't even know where to begin with how negative and backwards this is. I guess I could start by saying that if you replace "mathematicians" in your comment with literally any other profession you could make the same criticism about greed and clout. With the "writing their names in blood" comment, I have no words. I will weep for the world if it turns out that this is how people see math.
Many other professions are somewhat honest about their motivations.
Quants are open about that they just want to make a shitton of money.
The guys I know who work at OpenAI just want an expensive car and a hot wife to fuck.
Mathematicians(and many academics) however have long been hiding behind the guise of furthering human knowledge, understanding things, etc. Then a model does theorem proofs and suddenly there is chaos and the real incentives and motivations are put on display for the world to see.
> The whole situation seems completely grounded in that mathematicians are greedy for status and clout trying to write their name on new discoveries in blood and publish as many papers as possible
You're gonna get downvoted but this is absolutely true. People who've never been in real professional academia don't understand but this is exactly what most very successful academics are like.
> When you remove this greed and status seeking you might actually end up with a healthy environment.
Nah I think you're just gonna have collapse because you've removed all incentive.
Aside from the fact that $15M is couch change for these companies, and aside from the fact that this project is hypocritical and self-serving (as explained by many other posts), the whole idea of naming a supposedly large sum of money in a headline in order to impress is just silly. Whether a project is successful or worthwhile has little to do with how much funding may be lined up, and throwing numbers around is often just a smokescreen for poor planning and execution.
Genuinely the least they could do for what a pox they are on so many industries, on consumers of electronics, on local municipalities, on the environment...
And herein lies the rub: As others have pointed out in another active thread on AI in mathematics: The crisis could be described as one of career, status, and funding vs the general concept of the field. We have now circled back to question of who deserves these tokens!
I belive that the world would be in a much better place if all science was ultimately funded by a global organization such as UN and patents did not exist. If you are a research group that successfully creates something worth replicating then you should be eligable to receive a grant as well as request grants for projects that cost billions of dollars.
There is some success with this kind of strategy already when it comes to space, LHS and ITER come to mind. NASA is somewhat operating on this very same principle although it is a government organization to begin with.
Although the opposite reaction is that you should keep people behind inventions poor to encourage them to create more inventions which ultimately what ends up happening in the real world more often than not. The people who revolutioned the world did get fame and glory, including numerous monetary compensation packages - but compared to the people who sold those inventions they only got a tiny fraction of a fraction, this is especially clear with people who are normal employees and inventions are credited to a company rather than the few people who made it possible.
May be instead of funding military or other countries, they can fund scientist.. And all the tax funded must be in public domain instead of giving it to private companies.
I think a lot about how Terrence Tao and the usual 30 (already well-funded) math guys will receive this cash while us early-career math students are left holding the bag.
It's akin somewhat to "donating 100 dollars to the node JS foundation, not the packages that appear when you run npm fund".
But it's not like those guys will just pocket that money. They will use it like all academic grant money is used: to hire PhD students and postdocs.
Ha ha ha
The joys of trickle-down economy...
And blog in favor of AI ...
As much as this looks like a math problem, it's actually an everyone problem. Some hands-on (literally) have more way to go, but otherwise this is a "hop" that the entire society needs to cross. Honestly, I don't think there's going to be be any Math 2.0 as there won't be any other 2.0, at least not in any utilitarian way and the effort to find utility where there's none is misguided at best. The analogy I like to make is that with horses trying to find utility y in the Ford era.
It's also not an OpenAI, Anthropic or any specific name caused problem. This type of progress has always been happening, it's more or less coincidental (like Stigler's law). The problem though is we need to rethink how we operate as a society and too few (IMO) are trying to make this conversation happen.
That also means that you will need buy-in from a plurality/majority of that society to make that "hop". This is not going to break politically this election cycle, but it will show up. Barring a 2008 level event, it will likely be the issue with the greatest growth heading into 2028, and that will place the impetus on the "specific name"s to communicate how this isn't just trickle down benefits. Especially when it will be an easy sell to people that the "hop" means real people falling into the gap or getting left behind. They need to figure out a way to make the distribution of benefits more immediate and tangible to everyday folks, because the perception of the distributed costs is a very easy sell in this political environment, regardless of the reality. I can't imagine that getting better over the next two years.
You cannot use mathematics without understanding it.
It doesn't help you that AI understands it, when you don't. You are the one getting screwed over by others who understand statistics better than you do.
When you're rich enough, you can pay others (or AI) to protect you. But then you're dependent upon them.
So, under a transactional model of social relationships, you are in an arms race over raw intelligence and competency/data. With only one winner, who takes all in the end.
Logically, most people have already lost in that game, so why keep playing that nonsense?
No, it's not an "everyone" problem yet. Each field is likely on its own timeline. Knowing how well AI is at proving theorems is of only limited use for predicting what will happen and when in other fields.
too few are talking about reshaping society because those in power are not letting that happen. the amount of wealth concentrated at the top is staggering and allows them to fortify their position by bribing, buying governments and media.
I love how "society" is investing billions to develop a tech that makes its own citizens obsolete, but doesn't manage to provide basic healthcare, housing or infrastructure...
Once the citizens are made obsolete, there is no need for healthcare, housing, or (human) infrastructure. Just electricity, cooling water, and Internet connectivity.
That why our ancestors repurposed their pitchforks. History is marked by a drive towards inequality, punctuated by bouts of war and revolution that trigger a reset.
Maybe you get conditioned on how the rich usually treats other people, but this view isn't well supported by healthy discussions among the math community wrt recent AI 'disruption'
Ha, reminds me of how anthropic publishes their math papers with meat proxy math professors who were compensated for their "authorship" of the paper.
Essentially gifts for the annointed.
> > Under a partnership, the Simons Foundation, Anthropic and OpenAI will commit $15 million in combined funding and resources.
OAI and Ant got blowback for essentially strip mining mathematical discoveries into PR wins for their models, accidentally laying waste to the research field in process. Throwing ~$5M each into PR whitewashing (partially in token credits), seems self-serving.
Kudos to the Simons Foundation for seizing the moment to offer the labs a fig leaf of respectability. Might have been the fastest "Yes" on a grant proposal ever.
The research field of mathematics is obviously so different with these frontier models that to describe it has being laid waste is nonsensical.
It’s like saying the power loom laid waste to the field of textiles.
The bottleneck now is human understanding.
Ironically, that has been that way for most people since forever.
Comparing with the situation in programming, where code evaluation (obviously analogous to "understanding") is that bottleneck now, should get people the idea of being in the same boat.
> Under a partnership, the Simons Foundation, Anthropic and OpenAI will commit $15 million in combined funding and resources. The foundation will manage and award the funding, including through an open call for proposals, to support workshops and initiatives that help researchers evaluate recent AI-assisted results, learn and use new tools, share perspectives and shape collective standards for AI use.
The foundation was started in 1994, Wikipedia says "one of the largest charitable organizations in the United States with assets of over $5 billion in 2022" - Jim Simons founded the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund.
Simons Foundation also significantly funds arXiv, and also a large number of specific grants across maths and sciences. I don't think there's much agenda here.
arXiv, where BigAI trains from.
They also gifted $ 5m [1] to the FRO (Lean Focused Research Organization) [2].
[1] https://www.simonsfoundation.org/news/from-trust-to-verifica...
[2] https://lean-lang.org/fro/
So charitable that it launches this initiative with ClosedAI and Misanthropic. There are probably accelerationist and transhumanist nutcases at this foundation.
Quanta magazine is the propaganda arm.
Propaganda of what?
Big Math!!
Can you ever look behind the surface of ... anything at all? Only naive and childlike statements in favor of AI proponents. It is literally like saying: "Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson are esteemed members of the magnanimous and generous Royal Family."
My effort to help scientists navigate the AI era:
On ChatGPT: Settings -> Data controls -> Turn off “Improve model for everyone”
On Claude: Settings -> Privacy -> Turn off “Help improve our AI models”
They can scrape your work after you publish it.
This is the "democratization" in practice. Top pro-AI mathematicians will get the spoils.
Wonder if they realize these types of things help grow massive resentment against such companies? I'm astounded by how terrible the politics of SV actually is.
They try to transform mathematics to a charity. How generous!!!
Richard Simmons, what a guy
how is that different than what's been happening forever? Mathematics has ALWAYS been a "charity". The only thing that changes over time is who gives the money, first it's the church, then it's princes, then government, it's been corporations for a while, this is nothing new.
So $15M of OpenAI/Anthropic tokens, won't this just encourage more model use that started the "issue" in the first place?
What’s the solution? Not use OpenAI and Anthropic and watch less idealistic peers post breakthroughs?
In some way, yes. The whole situation seems completely grounded in that mathematicians are greedy for status and clout trying to write their name on new discoveries in blood and publish as many papers as possible. And now they are sad because they lost their way to this status.
When you remove this greed and status seeking you might actually end up with a healthy environment.
I don’t think it’s a matter of greed. I’d say it’s about incentives. In every field, people want to progress. I don’t think mathematicians are any different, even though we try to admire and idealize higher principles and the pursuit of knowledge. If you don’t publish papers under your name, you won’t progress in your career or receive enough support to work at the frontier. It’s just a general observation.
> greedy for status
Perhaps to some maths is about progress, like other sciences, rather than self-portrayal
Is this was the case no-one would have any issues with the progress the AI models are making.
> When you remove this greed and status seeking
I don’t necessarily disagree but it seems like the AI companies are just as status seeking and infinitely greedier.
> greedy for status
It may be true in some cases but as a blanket condemnation of the entire field it makes no sense. Moreover, I can't fathom how you could reach this conclusion if you've actually done any reading on "the whole situation." The reality is precisely the opposite of what you're claiming.
Mathematicians are upset partly because AI companies are "scooping" their work. If you had worked on something for years and this happened, you'd be upset, too. The manner in which this happened with Navier-Stokes was unconscionable. The mathematicians who did the work deserve recognition. OpenAI deliberately stole it from them.
More importantly, the purpose of mathematics isn't to produce proofs. It's to produce mathematics and mathematicians. Working through problems helps people find new mathematics -- and makes people mathematicians. A machine that generates proofs destroys that. It breaks the cycle that makes mathematics fruitful, interesting, and not just self-regenerative but self-propagating.
AI companies aren't just clear-cutting the fields of math; they're sowing them with salt -- and they're doing this precisely because of greed and hunger for status and the title of "first."
Unhinged and honestly nauseating take. Were you hurt by a mathematician at some point? I don't even know where to begin with how negative and backwards this is. I guess I could start by saying that if you replace "mathematicians" in your comment with literally any other profession you could make the same criticism about greed and clout. With the "writing their names in blood" comment, I have no words. I will weep for the world if it turns out that this is how people see math.
Many other professions are somewhat honest about their motivations.
Quants are open about that they just want to make a shitton of money.
The guys I know who work at OpenAI just want an expensive car and a hot wife to fuck.
Mathematicians(and many academics) however have long been hiding behind the guise of furthering human knowledge, understanding things, etc. Then a model does theorem proofs and suddenly there is chaos and the real incentives and motivations are put on display for the world to see.
> The whole situation seems completely grounded in that mathematicians are greedy for status and clout trying to write their name on new discoveries in blood and publish as many papers as possible
You're gonna get downvoted but this is absolutely true. People who've never been in real professional academia don't understand but this is exactly what most very successful academics are like.
> When you remove this greed and status seeking you might actually end up with a healthy environment.
Nah I think you're just gonna have collapse because you've removed all incentive.
overheard from academics the other day about students stealing each others credit
Seems that space is really about that
OpenAI's contribution is funding, separate from compute (not tokens).
Aside from the fact that $15M is couch change for these companies, and aside from the fact that this project is hypocritical and self-serving (as explained by many other posts), the whole idea of naming a supposedly large sum of money in a headline in order to impress is just silly. Whether a project is successful or worthwhile has little to do with how much funding may be lined up, and throwing numbers around is often just a smokescreen for poor planning and execution.
i think tokens for any scientists should be free.
Tokens aren't free, so I guess you mean we should force AI companies to subsidize scientists.
Genuinely the least they could do for what a pox they are on so many industries, on consumers of electronics, on local municipalities, on the environment...
Seems fair when the same companies pilfer public goods like physical infrastructure and our internet privacy.
ok hello I'm a scientist can I have my tokens now
And herein lies the rub: As others have pointed out in another active thread on AI in mathematics: The crisis could be described as one of career, status, and funding vs the general concept of the field. We have now circled back to question of who deserves these tokens!
Google will give free tokens to 10,000 scientists:
https://ai.google/gemini-for-science/
Sure, everyone's a scientist now.
We will only give the free tokens to the top X% of scientists, which is now a much smaller pool and you are unlikely to be considered LLMs or not.
How does one become a top X% of scientists without tokens?
no i'm sciencing i want my victory tokens and your victory tokens and your victory peptides too 15.10.26 hn ref uncareer doubleplusungood rectify
I for one support using our tax money to fund scientists
I belive that the world would be in a much better place if all science was ultimately funded by a global organization such as UN and patents did not exist. If you are a research group that successfully creates something worth replicating then you should be eligable to receive a grant as well as request grants for projects that cost billions of dollars.
There is some success with this kind of strategy already when it comes to space, LHS and ITER come to mind. NASA is somewhat operating on this very same principle although it is a government organization to begin with.
Although the opposite reaction is that you should keep people behind inventions poor to encourage them to create more inventions which ultimately what ends up happening in the real world more often than not. The people who revolutioned the world did get fame and glory, including numerous monetary compensation packages - but compared to the people who sold those inventions they only got a tiny fraction of a fraction, this is especially clear with people who are normal employees and inventions are credited to a company rather than the few people who made it possible.
May be instead of funding military or other countries, they can fund scientist.. And all the tax funded must be in public domain instead of giving it to private companies.
"One of the foundations responsible for the AI mess bribes mathematicians to accelerate AI."
How shameless can you be?
What mess?