5 ms·

If the title have said in the age of "LLMs", I might have given it a try.

• GPerson 2mo ago
  You should give it a try. Tao is a wonderful person and is trying to help humanity.
  • qsera 2mo ago
    > is trying to help humanity. That is what all marketing wants you to think...
    • GPerson 2mo ago
      It’s not marketing. This guy could have signed up for one of those hundred million dollar salaries with a phone call and did not. I know several people who have met him and everyone says he’s the genuine article. He’s actually just devoted to human mathematics. One tragic thing about all of this is that unlike almost every profession, mathematics actually has a kind of honesty. You honestly solve the problem or you don’t. The pecking order in mathematics at least used to have a grounding in actual abilities. People respect this guy because he’s actually legit.
      • qsera 2mo ago
        Legit people are used by marketing all the time.
        • GPerson 2mo ago
          I think the villains who run these companies benefit from Tao’s actions because he’s a de facto thought leader of mathematics not taking a very hard anti-AI stance. However, I don’t think a very hard anti-AI stance is correct for someone in his position. Honestly, do you want a bunch of AI labs to 100% dictate the future of whatever your field is or do you want the best leaders of your field to at least try to shape how AI will change it? And if all of the legitimate people in math ignore AI entirely, then historically important parts of the field will get entirely taken over by dilettantes and AI labs. I’m all for math institutions being a safe haven for AI free math work. But I don’t want to see some space X intern solve all the most important problems on a whim and no leaders in math be aware of it. (I’m not sure the extent to which you think this is marketing. I’m operating under the assumption that you agree with his Hypothesis 4.1. If you don’t, then I’d assume you haven’t seen the long list of prominent open math problems that these systems are providing answers to. And if this doesn’t sway you about Hypothesis 4.1 I’d just halt and ask why.)
          • qsera 2mo ago
            > Hypothesis 4.1.. What does it say?
  • cubefox 2mo ago
    If he was, he wouldn't be doing useless pure math research. He is doing his hobby (pure math) while getting paid for it. That's not what helping humanity looks like. (Yes, pure math research is useless. Applied math is very useful, but he is doing pure math, which is very useless.)
    • GPerson 2mo ago
      It’s almost stunning how ignorant you are about everything you’re talking about. Tao publishes work that would fit in applied math research programs. There’s no meaningful distinction between pure and applied math and I doubt you know any based on your comment. There’s at least 3 additional corrections I’d like to make to your ignorant thinking but I’ll leave it at that.
      • cubefox 2mo ago
        Even Tao says that proofs are worthless if humans don't understand them. If they had any independent utility, human understanding would not be necessary.
        • GPerson 2mo ago
          Right. And?
          • cubefox 2mo ago
            The world's top mathematician agrees with me, rather than with you.
            • GPerson 2mo ago
              It looks to me like the world’s top mathematician and I are perfectly aligned and you have no clue what you are talking about on any topic mentioned.
              • 2mo ago
• frozenseven 2mo ago
  Out-of-hand dismissal of Terence Tao is certainly a take. And the term "artificial intelligence (AI)" has been the name of the field for 70 years and counting. If anything, "LLM" is a misnomer that's been lingering around since 2018-19. When the term was coined, these systems were relatively small, experimental, and could only produce impractical facsimiles of the English language. This is obviously no longer the case today.
  • eloisant 2mo ago
    "artificial intelligence" is a vague and moving target. I'm not sure I would call that "a field". It's been used to talk about computers playing chess, then machine learning, and now LLM-based systems.
    • frozenseven 2mo ago
      Of course it's been "used" to talk about those things, because all of those things are examples of AI. Always have been.
      • qsera 2mo ago
        Then it has always been the age of "AI"...So the article title is inaccurate!
        • frozenseven 2mo ago
          We can meaningfully talk about (1) the existence of a field and (2) the said field hitting its stride. The title of Tao's article denotes the latter. And oh, what a stride it is: https://vibemathed.com/stats https://vibemathed.com/stats
          • deleted 2mo ago
            [deleted]
          • qsera 2mo ago
            Sure, but I expect more precision from people like the author.