4 ms·

This is the thought process that I fail to see many people take (both here and other places). AI is changing many fields, ok what does that look like and how do

This is the thought process that I fail to see many people take (both here and other places). AI is changing many fields, ok what does that look like and how do we adapt? What can we do now that we couldn't before? What skills should I learn to adapt to this changing world? I think this is how we move forward. If you can get past the scary aspects of AI (not talking about datacenters or billionaires, that is a different subject) then you might be able to see how exciting this can be.

Yokolos 2mo ago
Even as somebody who uses AI every day and has integrated it in useful ways, I don't see how the rise of the AI industry can be anything other than terrifying. It signals the rise of a new feudal system. Couple that with the rolling back of democracy across the globe and growing trend of authoritarianism, even in Europe, and I just can't be excited. In Germany particularly, it feels like every week there's some new idea to increase surveillance and control over the populace while the AfD is knocking on the door.
- 2snakes 2mo ago
  Open source intellectual power though. The promise of the personal computer.
  - vouaobrasil 2mo ago
    The fact is, open source was a solution to a different problem: closed source. Open source is not a panacea that will solve everything.
  - knollimar 2mo ago
    Whats personal about a datacenter?
    - 2snakes 2mo ago
      You could have said the same thing about mainframes in the past? I am talking about smaller open source models not huge ones that need spaceships to run.
      - knollimar 2mo ago
        I thought the implication of the feudal system was that the spaceships create landed nobility
- tackta 2mo ago
  Compared to what though? When was this golden age when things were not scary or turbulent? If you read about life in the 19th century, it was more turbulent than today with change. We seem to frame these debates against some random week in spring 2017 that if it ever existed at all, was extremely fleeting. I think the bigger issue is that social media doesn't exactly provide historical context. If anything it provides a type of ahistoric , hysterical context to the present moment. Then if you have no social media, everyone feels more and more like a hysterical lunatic living in a reality that doesn't exist if you just go outside and put the phone away for 5 minutes.
vouaobrasil 2mo ago
As a (sort of former) mathematician myself, I can say two things. First, one of the most exciting parts of mathematics is to see what other people can do with it and the results they obtain, and learning from them (and sharing with them in return). And second, I am completely uninterested in what AI has to offer. To me (and most normal people) knowledge pursuit is about inspiring others with discovery and the intellectual joy of doing something yourself. Like it or not, that's a necessary requirement for any field to healthy. To put it more plainly, one cannot decouple the fun from the work. I suspect many are jealous of this, but whatever. Therefore, I see no benefit to AI in math, none whatsoever. Senior mathematicians like Terry Tao might have a different approach because I can imagine: who can resist an oracle that can help them out with their toughest problems. But Dr. Tao IMO is too blinded by that to see the destructive nature of AI, and to be frank, a lot of top mathematicians have too much hubris to understand that they can't control AI.
- qw3127 2mo ago
  People here don't want fun for others. The site is full of wannabe entrepreneurs whom daddy bought a startup and got VC friends to fund it. They think they are better than you and me and everyone is just a human resource who has no right to enjoy anything. That is why they hope for the industrialization of the sciences. The C students can feel equal to the A students. Why Tao goes along? He is Chinese and they have an insatiable social pressure to be the first and best at "new" things. Since Yau tried to rip off Perelman, my view of the Chinese pressure cooker influence on Western academics has changed. Especially since the results aren't the same as in the times when everything was more relaxed in academia and the stopwatch idiots hadn't taken over yet.
  - seanhunter 2mo ago
    Terry Tao isn’t Chinese, he was born Australian and has lived in the US for a long time.
- gravypod 2mo ago
  > And second, I am completely uninterested in what AI has to offer. To me (and most normal people) knowledge pursuit is about inspiring others with discovery and the intellectual joy of doing something yourself. I often hear that people are "uninterested in what AI has to offer" but I don't really understand it. I understand this is a mix of ethics and engineering that I don't often engage with but I do not understand why someone would explicitly state that they are not interested in improvements to the world based on the source of the improvement. The comment I am replying to did not say that LLMs cannot create improvements. That would be a different discussion! It instead says that it does not care about fruits born from the LLM tree. It seems highly likely to me that through a combination of LLMs and traditional optimization software like vizier that manufacturing, industrial processes, scientific research, or even bakeries will see some improved output through the mixing of domain specific expertise and enablement from LLMs. I think right now, in the extreme hype environment we live in where people say AI will do everything and take over the world and take your job and give you nothing, people are burned out. Once we get past this point through I am hoping people start talking about what LLMs can do that will actually improve our lives and which can actually work. Much of what people tell me LLMs can do, don't actually work reliably. But there are many cases where LLMs have been a step function in capabilities. Examples: OCR that really works, fuzzy search, fixing scoped bugs in software, building prototypes of software, etc.
NitpickLawyer 2mo ago
> fail to see many people take (both here and other places) A lot of very vocal people have already taken a position (as in ideology) on this, and are very reluctant to change it, even when faced with obvious evidence to the contrary. It's like anonymous gary marcus clones. Every time something cool happens, they move the goal posts. Even in this thread there's someone saying that recent math advances are "models just brute forcing until something sticks". shrug

Yokolos 2mo ago

Even as somebody who uses AI every day and has integrated it in useful ways, I don't see how the rise of the AI industry can be anything other than terrifying. It signals the rise of a new feudal system. Couple that with the rolling back of democracy across the globe and growing trend of authoritarianism, even in Europe, and I just can't be excited. In Germany particularly, it feels like every week there's some new idea to increase surveillance and control over the populace while the AfD is knocking on the door.

2snakes 2mo ago
Open source intellectual power though. The promise of the personal computer.
- vouaobrasil 2mo ago
  The fact is, open source was a solution to a different problem: closed source. Open source is not a panacea that will solve everything.
- knollimar 2mo ago
  Whats personal about a datacenter?
  - 2snakes 2mo ago
    You could have said the same thing about mainframes in the past? I am talking about smaller open source models not huge ones that need spaceships to run.
    - knollimar 2mo ago
      I thought the implication of the feudal system was that the spaceships create landed nobility
tackta 2mo ago
Compared to what though? When was this golden age when things were not scary or turbulent? If you read about life in the 19th century, it was more turbulent than today with change. We seem to frame these debates against some random week in spring 2017 that if it ever existed at all, was extremely fleeting. I think the bigger issue is that social media doesn't exactly provide historical context. If anything it provides a type of ahistoric , hysterical context to the present moment. Then if you have no social media, everyone feels more and more like a hysterical lunatic living in a reality that doesn't exist if you just go outside and put the phone away for 5 minutes.

vouaobrasil 2mo ago

As a (sort of former) mathematician myself, I can say two things. First, one of the most exciting parts of mathematics is to see what other people can do with it and the results they obtain, and learning from them (and sharing with them in return). And second, I am completely uninterested in what AI has to offer. To me (and most normal people) knowledge pursuit is about inspiring others with discovery and the intellectual joy of doing something yourself. Like it or not, that's a necessary requirement for any field to healthy. To put it more plainly, one cannot decouple the fun from the work. I suspect many are jealous of this, but whatever. Therefore, I see no benefit to AI in math, none whatsoever. Senior mathematicians like Terry Tao might have a different approach because I can imagine: who can resist an oracle that can help them out with their toughest problems. But Dr. Tao IMO is too blinded by that to see the destructive nature of AI, and to be frank, a lot of top mathematicians have too much hubris to understand that they can't control AI.

qw3127 2mo ago
People here don't want fun for others. The site is full of wannabe entrepreneurs whom daddy bought a startup and got VC friends to fund it. They think they are better than you and me and everyone is just a human resource who has no right to enjoy anything. That is why they hope for the industrialization of the sciences. The C students can feel equal to the A students. Why Tao goes along? He is Chinese and they have an insatiable social pressure to be the first and best at "new" things. Since Yau tried to rip off Perelman, my view of the Chinese pressure cooker influence on Western academics has changed. Especially since the results aren't the same as in the times when everything was more relaxed in academia and the stopwatch idiots hadn't taken over yet.
- seanhunter 2mo ago
  Terry Tao isn’t Chinese, he was born Australian and has lived in the US for a long time.
gravypod 2mo ago
> And second, I am completely uninterested in what AI has to offer. To me (and most normal people) knowledge pursuit is about inspiring others with discovery and the intellectual joy of doing something yourself. I often hear that people are "uninterested in what AI has to offer" but I don't really understand it. I understand this is a mix of ethics and engineering that I don't often engage with but I do not understand why someone would explicitly state that they are not interested in improvements to the world based on the source of the improvement. The comment I am replying to did not say that LLMs cannot create improvements. That would be a different discussion! It instead says that it does not care about fruits born from the LLM tree. It seems highly likely to me that through a combination of LLMs and traditional optimization software like vizier that manufacturing, industrial processes, scientific research, or even bakeries will see some improved output through the mixing of domain specific expertise and enablement from LLMs. I think right now, in the extreme hype environment we live in where people say AI will do everything and take over the world and take your job and give you nothing, people are burned out. Once we get past this point through I am hoping people start talking about what LLMs can do that will actually improve our lives and which can actually work. Much of what people tell me LLMs can do, don't actually work reliably. But there are many cases where LLMs have been a step function in capabilities. Examples: OCR that really works, fuzzy search, fixing scoped bugs in software, building prototypes of software, etc.

NitpickLawyer 2mo ago

> fail to see many people take (both here and other places) A lot of very vocal people have already taken a position (as in ideology) on this, and are very reluctant to change it, even when faced with obvious evidence to the contrary. It's like anonymous gary marcus clones. Every time something cool happens, they move the goal posts. Even in this thread there's someone saying that recent math advances are "models just brute forcing until something sticks". shrug