"I'm on a war footing": Terry Tao and the crisis in math

I find this entirely self serving.

Terrence Tao was very supportive of AI and formalizing math with lean when it looked like it was giving ‘generalists’ like him an edge over mathematicians too deep into one particular niche field.

But now that it’s letting everyone, including mathematicians who are perhaps too specialized, explore ideas and patterns from related math fields, he’s suddenly ‘on a war footing’.

“They took’er jobs!”

Funny when it’s someone else eh?

Just learn a new trade Terry.

(I am kidding if it wasn't obvious)

I’m enjoying Terry’s “first popular math book” plug strategy - getting his name into discourse prior to release in two weeks without needing to plug the book. Maybe it’s just that AI maths has arrived at the same time. Well, I’ll buy it.

https://www.quantabooks.org/books/six-math-essentials/

Has OpenAI shared any new interesting _problems_? I.e. do more than strip-mine mathematics, as said in the article, but said: "Here is a question I cannot answer, it's interesting for this and that reason, I believe it's true for this and that reason, it's beyond me though, have at it." Has that happened yet?

> Much as one cannot unhear a movie spoiler or a crossword clue, one cannot explore a problem as profitably and richly once one is aware of an existing solution

Certainly, it’s like being made aware of cheat codes to video games: One doesn’t enjoy the game as much after but surely knowing something is true means you can find many other things that come from the pathway to it now that you know it’s true. Lots of science and tech is like this where someone shows something is doable and then people find better ways to do it but until that person showed it was doable there was no progress.

> I am horrified by the many person-years” of research, particularly by young mathematicians, “being casually disrupted or destroyed,” he wrote.

That’s what technology does. And he might be upset but we’re the ones paying for it and frankly, I’m happier to have more questions answered than for fewer answered but in an artisanal fashion.

Most notable is the fact that the released facts are like “treated waste”. But if the question was worth answering and the value is only in a good answer and not simply a correct answer, then the value has simply not been realized.

But that feels strange then that the value is in the good answer, not just a right answer and yet one finds oneself unable to go get the good answer because a correct answer exists.

The fact that any answers are made public at all is useful to us all. That’s free knowledge. Would it have been better if OpenAI had discovered this very achievable fact and not said anything? Surely the papers, post discovery would have spoken of the “hoarding” of such “essential human knowledge”.

Overall, I find the thing unconvincing wholly.

the live video interview on numberphile comes without the New York Times' narrative filter

I find it interesting that, several years ago when discussing AI, folks used to focus on how automation would first come for blue collar work. Things like driving being automated and truck drivers replaced. And then eventually on the horizon we would see things like this.

But we still have no self driving cars. Seems like the automation came by in the opposite direction. Perhaps driving will actually be the final thing automated.

> They “used math for what they needed, which was to evaluate their models,”

OAI first paper on the prize was a pretty shitty thing to do. But the rest of this looks like they are just mining the corpus and taking a brute force approach to do it.

Im going to say this again, the "pure math" academic types need to get a grip. Plenty of your peers got PHD's and happily made a fortune in finance, while screwing the world (See 2008 housing bubble) and none of you said a peep about that.

TLDR: "I didn't understand this proof and there is no one to explain it to me"