Foot guns are not fit to market and under any sensible consumer regulatory framework are recalled and banned until proven safe.
AI products are not regulated like every other consumer product. If your bank’s app had a big green “share” button shadowing the “close dialog” which shared your personal info in the same manner, any sensible regulator would like a word with your bank’s IT department. If your teller handed you a paper with a small print saying “by signing you approve this transaction being shared with your boss” likewise regulators would put a stop to it.
Why hasn't Venmo been investigated? The amount of financial transactions that I don't want or need to know about is bewildering. People don't seem to know or understand their transactions are public by default.
I am not a native speaker but in my experience it is an accurate use of the word “forced”.
English speakers generally use this word in a very broad sense “and now Netflix is forcing ads on paying users”, “because there was no sink, I was forced to drink the whole thing”. It is only when you are literally describing a crime where this word has this strict meaning you are alluding to.
Why are you two-siding this. There is only one misaligned agent here and that is the company OpenAI. What OpenAI is doing sucks, and people are calling OpenAI out for sucking. However mathematicians (the main victims of OpenAI’s lousy behavior) behave is not the issue here.
If some mathematicians complain about OpenAI sucking, that is fine actually, and if others are more “mature” about it, that that is fine too. Neither of these reactions should be at put as an equivalence to the blame OpenAI deserves for this stunt.
Are they fully “doing math” in an aligned way though? They are finding mathematical proofs, which is important, but contextualizing results in the prior literature and clearly communicating the approach and implications is just as much part of mathematical research.
You might argue that these aspects of math are less important in the new AI accelerated math world, because agents will inevitably be smarter than humans, but I think clear framing and communication is even more important than before because with this technology we can choose to augment our intelligence instead of defer it
> Are they fully “doing math” in an aligned way though?
No matter what you think "aligned" means here, publicly releasing advancements in a scientific field shouldn't be gatekept or be perceived as misaligned in any possible way.
If anything, the true misalignment comes from people trying to prevent these advancements from happening or being disclosed, or putting research behind BS paywalls.
I don‘t think this is gatekeeping. OpenAI is filthy rich, they can afford to pay mathematicians to go over these papers and produce results consistent with the scientific method. The fact they don‘t is evidence of their misalignment. Their motives are obviously ulterior and have nothing to do with advancing knowledge. If they were they would adhere to the scientific method, hire experts, and produce reproducible results.
> Putting research behind BS paywalls.
Yes, that is gatekeeping. But there are more then one way to be misaligned. And the practice of publishers is not being discussed here. No need for whataboutism.
Do other researchers or research institutions “pay mathematicians (other than those in their employ) to go over these papers” or do they simply publish their work for review as part of producing “reproducible results”?
AI may be taking over Mathematicians’ jobs, along with everyone else’s, and it’s OK to hate that, but the scientific method says nothing about that, or hiring experts, or ulterior motives, or “being filthy rich.”
OpenAI has not released the model for replication (not even to select few), they have not even shared the prompts. All we have is their results and their compute times (which may even be lies). This is the opposite of the scientific method. The scientific method asks for falsifiability and replication. If a hypothesis is not falsifiable, it is not scientific, if results cannot be replicated, they are not scientific. OpenAI fails on the second account here.
Not being scientific is excusable in some context. A high-school prodigy might stumble upon an unexpected result that they had a hunch about, but fail to make those results replicatable. Similarly a YouTuber with under a 1000 subscribers might propose an unfalsifiable hypothesis as entertainment. Being scientific takes skill and effort, and it is not free, so we can’t expect anybody to follow the standards. However OpenAI claims to be a trillion dollar company, and they do not have the same excuses as a small YouTuber or a high school student. OpenAI absolutely can afford to follow the standards, if they claim to be furthering the human understanding, then they should be scientific about it.
I know I am, though maybe not as visibly so as your parent. Us anti-AI Luddites are arguing against a massive propaganda machine with trillions of dollars on the line. It is not easy, and it is mentally draining. Especially since AI-companies are behaving in an obviously anti-human, anti-science, and anti-industry ways for their own short term profits.
And worse yet, we have seen this before (albeit on a lesser scale). GMO was supposed to solve global hunger, Carbon capture was supposed to solve climate change, etc. etc. These were obvious lies and propaganda back then as much as the lies where AI are supposed to help humanity today. It gets tiring, and at some point we simply crash out.
unfortunately technology will never fix humanity's tendency to ruin itself (see: war, climate change, etc; all of which we know the solutions for ie 'stop killing people' 'stop using oil' etc) but that is not a fault of the technology itself (gmo, carbon capture, crispr, llms, etc)
This is simply not true. Plenty of technology exists which has helped humanity unambiguously. But there is a difference between good and helpful technology and a grift. GMO could have been helpful but it was mostly just a grift, GMO solving world hunger was always an obvious marketing stunt, and it worked, even though many of us (particularly on the political left) saw it as such and called it out as such. Ditto Carbon capture.
AI is currently the grift of choice.
Also I fundamentally disagree that there is any tendency for humanity to ruin it self. There are perverse intensives, which rewards undesirable behavior, there are unfair, undemocratic, or otherwise hostile powerstructures which allows one class of peoples to exploit another class of peoples. And some technology sometimes plays a pivotal role in maintaining or furthering these hostile power structures/perverse intensives.
Dredging every inch of the lake to catch every single fish and dumping them all in one big pile the town square is just “solving fishing and releasing the fish to the public”, this anti-trawler hysteria is getting really funny.
I too hate how intellectual property has been abused by capital to exploit labor. However, what I hate more then intellectual property is straight up theft of labor. Vibecoders are doing the latter.
The market works in mysterious ways. What companies do for marketing is often irrational, what companies do to attract investors is likewise often irrational, and why investors invest in companies is also often irrational.
Why should that make a material difference to the IPO? Because of the vibes, and investors are indeed all about the vibes.
> what companies do to attract investors is likewise often irrational, and why investors invest in companies is also often irrational.
Note that the cool thing about rationality is that it does not depend on transitivity. If what companies do to attract investors works, then it is in fact rational of them, regardless of the rationally of investors.
And neither is rationality absolute nor consistent. One company can exhibit rational behavior while attracting investors, while a different company does not. A single companies can be rational at times and irrational at other times. And quite often companies will behave in extremely dumb ways. Especially in our current economic system where the cost of being dumb is negatively correlated with the amount of money available to you, and that cost goes down on a sigmoid curve.
The first paragraph is describing a general trend over multiple events across multiple agents. Between zero and three of these can be true for any transaction across every transaction.
The second paragraph is specific to OpenAIs behavior.
And that is part of the reason why, if you are a great mathematician and you have very good understanding of programming, you want to be local and not do anything on someone else’s server, and that doesn’t just apply to mathematics, but to many other high-level fields of learning. Can you afford to have an original idea? be appropriated by the data center crew?
We all know it’s only a matter of time before lawsuits in this area become widespread particularly in lawyer happy America.
This would that the proofs would be almost done anyway, which statistically could not be the case, or that these mathematicians were already progressing thanks to ChatGPT. Still a provenance question, but the impact of AI is unquestionable with regards to outcome.
The proofs would only need to be well on their way enough that the only thing needed to finish it were thousands of terawatthours of energy. Something which the mathematician having their work stolen does not have.
Neither would be AI fault. Technology is neutral. Nuclear energy can both save us from anthropic climate change or it can kill us all in a senseless war.
TV could have been used to ensure every kid in the world had access to the same educational opportunities a Venture Capitalist or a new yorker banker kid has, or it could be used to massify culture and propaganda. We, as societies choose to have a SEO infested internet.
Nothing that has been made by humanity is final, inevitable. There are people who may want you to think so, but they are lying to you. It is not like the 4th law of Newton was that we had to have continuous economic growth so it makes sense to have compound interest. It is not like weak nuclear force means government will spend more than what their revenues, but that instead of printing money directly to account for that, they need to come up with complicated debt schemes that make sure the one best positioned in financial system can sow what was taken via money devaluation from the poor and the middle class, and then use this extra money to research technologies to put those people out of jobs.
All of those things are political and social choices, neither is the result of a technology per se.
I guess we don‘t always get what we expect.
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