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How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?
- cyanydeez 18d agowouldn't it be dystopian secrecy cause a flock camera is equally capable of watching the mathematicians as it is the public citizens.
- kakacik 16d agoMaybe mathematicians are smart enough to never ever buy such piece of shit on higher principle, regardless of their actual fiasco?
- BigTTYGothGF 16d agoI am a (former) mathematician and know many more. > Maybe mathematicians are smart enough to never ever buy such piece of shit on higher principle They are not. Mathematicians are as human as most of the rest of us here.
- antonvs 16d agoIndividuals aren’t the ones buying Flock cameras.
- aaron695 18d ago[dead]
- rramadass 17d ago> Regardless of the true cost, it seems that professional mathematicians now need to wary about what they put into a LLM and think hard about how to disclose and publish a result. This is all but guaranteed now. Mathematicians/Scientists/Researchers need to stop sharing freely with "AI Companies" and have explicit clauses in place in their publications about not using their research without their explicit consent. There should be a clear legal distinction between using research data for AI model-training vs. another researcher using it. Come up with a legal framework, establish procedures for sharing and using others work and have a single scientific body in charge of enforcing it.
- JMKH42 16d agoThe USA doesn't have legal frameworks any more, you just buy and sell the right to do what you want. Even our supreme court is disingenuous now.
- nradov 16d agoJust putting a clause in a publication won't prevent it from being used as training data. Information wants to be free. The frontier LLM vendors do sell enterprise licenses which contractually guarantee that your prompts won't be used for training. (Maybe they'll secretly violate the agreement but in principle it's legally enforceable.) Scholars and universities who care about credit and attribution will either have to purchase those licenses or run their own private open-weight LLM instances.
- Analemma_ 16d agoI don't like this and I wish it weren't true, but I think the period of "information wants to be free" is coming to an end, it was a relic of a bygone era. Increasingly, making your information free means you're the sucker who is doing free labor for AI companies, or worse, you're helping your competitors. Paywalls, login walls, and rate-limits are going up everywhere: there's the GitLab news on the home page right now, and sites like Twitter, Reddit etc. which used to be publicly-readable are now gated (and Xitter is using the legal system to shut down any bypasses). I hate this but I don't think there's any going back now that LLMs exist.
- pavel_lishin 16d ago"Information wants to be free" never meant that people want to release their information; it meant that information is very hard to keep secret, and that everything leaks like a sieve, and especailly that once it's out, it's out forever.
- nradov 16d agoExactly. While there are a few academics who work in private for years and then surprise the world with an amazing breakthrough, most of modern science and mathematics is a collaborate process. Researchers make gradual progress on hard problems, and discuss issues with colleagues and students along the way. Some of those collaborators will then pass on the information to social media or public discussion forums or free-tier LLM prompts or whatever and it gets incorporated into the next round of training runs. Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.
- perching_aix 16d agoI'd guess universities might starting hosting open source models. They can probably actually afford to, unlike individual mathematicians. Though maybe if there's a flurry of math-optimized agents coming up, like there are small coding agents, those might be feasible to host personally.
- ndriscoll 16d agoSimple: if you don't publish your work, we don't fund you. Why is this even a question?
- watwut 16d agoThis is about cooperation before publishing results. And they will keep everything medieval secret, else some big company steals it and claims it their own.
- ndriscoll 16d agoSo then the solution is to publish more often (e.g. on a public blog) even if your ideas are not fully developed in order to establish priority and show you are doing something. Analogously with software development, it's always been good practice to write things down, but since the start of this year it's become dramatically more important for everyday work.
- fortzi 16d agoI don’t follow… if you publish your underdeveloped ideas, these companies will develop them for you, which is the problem
- mitxela 15d agoAnd they won't credit you.
- ndriscoll 15d agoWill they do that? Obviously they want some publicity about their model capabilities recently, but even there they have their eyes on major newsworthy problems. Are they going to scan everyone's blogs so they can scoop them on some random paper on e.g. PDEs modeling plasma dynamics in different gasses? Why? They just want to spite researchers and are willing to burn money doing it?
- 14d ago
- optimiz3 16d agoSimilar principle applies to open source or any other creative endeavor put in the public domain.
- Ancalagon 16d agoanyone else already experiencing this in a corporate environment? I know I am. Its not just between teams either, its within them.
- FridgeSeal 16d agoThe age of a Warhammer 40k Tech Priest is upon us! Praise to the Machine God. Just, without the aliens, space travel, or mech-suits. Got half the other downsides though!
- whythismatters 16d agoMore on the upcoming priesthood and monasteries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743400
- codethief 16d agoWhat a fantastic article! Thank you for sharing it!
- makerdiety 16d agoA Tech Priest is way smarter than any software developer you could ever think of. Your joke overestimates the intelligence of real life humans.
- palmotea 15d ago> A Tech Priest is way smarter than any software developer you could ever think of. https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Tech-Priest https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Tech-Priest: > Despite the never-ending thirst for knowledge of all branches of the order, most Tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus have lost the ability to innovate or carry out basic scientific research. > No longer the master of its creations, the Cult Mechanicus is enslaved to the past. It maintains the glories of yesteryear with rite, dogma and edict instead of true discernment and comprehension. > For instance, even the theoretically simple process of activating a vehicle's engine is preceded by the application of ritual oils, the burning of sacred resins and the chanting of long and complex hymns.
- mmooss 16d agoStop treating AI companies and their software as somehow unconstrained, above-the-law actors. It's delusional that anyone buys that. Regulate them appropriately. At the same time, mathematicians should be using sophisticated, specialized LLM tools in much more sophisticated ways than lay people. There should be no way lay people can compete. There are new tools to master and if you use your slide rule, you won't keep up. It's a chance for mathematics productivity to boom.
- Terr_ 16d ago> Stop treating [them as] unconstrained, above-the-law actors. With apologies to Baudelaire: The greatest trick exploitative powers ever played was convincing the people that it was impossible to imagine anything else. Sometimes blinkering people so that they never ask the question "why is this being done to me" or "why is justice not possible" is much easier than finding an answer that will get them to go away.
- mitxela 15d agoIf in 2019 someone wrote a program that generated photorealistic child porn on demand, the FBI would break down their door the day after hearing about it.
- Arubis 16d agoLike we can prevent the rest of our society from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy: by treating individuals with respect and dignity and not as the ore from which resources can be profitably extracted.
- FactNotFeeling 16d agoAny solutions to this issue that aren't unrealistic socialist pipe dreams?
- darig 16d ago[dead]
- krapp 16d agoOnly realistic capitalist nightmares.
- PostOnce 16d agoYou could've asked that about people saying we want 8 hour work days, sick leave, and safer work 100 years ago, and yet we got them.
- ungovernableCat 16d agoThose were fought for, with large strikes and sadly bloodshed and conflict. The pressing issue is that in the industrial revolution, capital needed labour so strikes are ineffective. How do people fight for their rights in a system that sees no need for them? Especially in one where power is concentrating and politics is frequently on sale to the highest bidder.
- mitxela 15d agoIn the margins, guerilla-style. A system having no need for me means it doesn't need to know I exist, or can be placated with fake data about me.
- 16d ago
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 16d agoyou don't worry about it for a couple years and check back to see if its a real problem or a panic induced engagement generator
- xenadu02 16d agoWe don't. Prior to LLMs there was some minimal effort required to snipe someone and possibly your reputation was attached otherwise there would have been no point in publishing to begin with. Now anyone with a few dollars can do it, many who don't have a reputation to worry about. It's the same problem as YouTube AI slop, AI-generated music, and everything else. Don't you dare tweet or blog about a video idea or hum a few bars from a song - within an hour 27 people will have posted AI slop rip-offs. There's something uniquely depressing about being beaten to the punch by a thief that doesn't deliver the same soul-crushing impact as having someone copy you after the fact.
- sixtyj 16d agoCopycats and rip-offs are really fast. Recently outbid.lol was the target.
- Morromist 16d agoDefinitly seeing this with video games. Especially ones that are easy to make and have generic names. I mean you could already easily clone those before, but now 10 people will easily clone them. See this amusing reddit post. https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1wfl64l/game_went_viral_on_social_media_3_weeks_ago_dev/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1wfl64l/game_went...
- xpct 16d agoI think making these type of games simply becomes an unviable source of income in the current era. I'm sure there's a named concept for this: the idea of the game is its selling point, and has to be revealed to consumers to market itself. But the market has low friction (via Steam distribution, and by copies being cheap to make w/ LLMs), so you can't reliably establish your product before masses take over, especially if you don't have reputation built up from previous games. You have to be bringing in something else for this not to happen, trade secrets not present to the consumer being one such factor.
- mitxela 15d ago
- deadbabe 16d agoI welcome the era of secrecy. After living so much in this era of open information where everyone seems to know everything, secrets may be a way to make things more interesting again.
- charcircuit 16d agoThere is a financial incentive to selling access to the leading LLMs needed to find whatever secret result there is out there. See the play station hypervisor 0day from the other day. If a LLM can find someone's secret 0day they are flaunting around they can find a math proof someone else says they have.
- lacker 16d agoI have seen two worries recently: 1. People will publish so much frontier mathematics, humans won't be able to understand it all 2. Frontier mathematics will all be kept secret Fortunately, these seem like they can't both happen at once.
- d_sem 16d agoI think the worry is: 1. People will publish AI generated frontier math making it difficult to identify frontier mathematicians. 2. Trained frontier mathematicians will become scarce
- aerodexis 16d agoYou don't think frontier mathematics is already secret?
- 0xWTF 16d agoHow to admit you're in finance without admitting you're in finance?
- computerfriend 15d agoOr signals intelligence.
- leonidasrup 15d agoOr Cryptanalysis. " The National Security Agency is the largest employer of mathematicians in the U.S. " https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mathematicians-and-computer-scientists-shrug-over-the-nsa-hacking/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mathematicians-an...
- short_sells_poo 15d ago99.99% of finance is freshman level math if at that. Then 99.99% of the remaining 0.01% is somewhat more complicated but still not frontier level. There are very-very few cases where you need truly advanced math in finance. The problems that need solving are generally vastly more pedestrian. You need to deal with terrible data quality, terrible formats, noise in every aspect of your work, disruptions, lack of standards, inability to generate new data (and repeat experiments), conflicting and often opaque incentives, technical problems ranging from shitty APIs to having to squeeze nanoseconds out of your network stack, etc. These are all difficult problems, but they are crucially not frontier math problems (by and large).
- roosterIllusi0n 16d agoUniversities should be providing university hosted llms to their faculty and students. No student or faculty member should be using public llms for their work. They can share info directly with other people or in non-public forums to keep it away from commercial llms. It is going to have to be against the rules to submit anyone else's work to a commercial llm. Businesses are going to have similar policies. Universities can host the llms just like they hosted any other computer lab or web service on campus. This is what universities are supposed to be doing. Universities should be involved in open model research and should offer models that are not datamined.
- Loudergood 16d agoTheir main cash cow is disappearing(students) Also from what I've seen of University IT it's still very very siloed by department.
- jampekka 15d agoOr if you are afraid of scooping, just don't use public LLMs? At universities, apart from admin stuff, nobody will tell you what you must or musn't use. And I really doubt university ITs would be able to run these, at least in an up to date and stable manner. High performance computing is typically run totally separately from everyday user systems, and tend to be extremely painful to use (hello slurm!).
- roosterIllusi0n 15d agoIt's today's computer lab or server time. This is something colleges would have always provided in house. It is very strange that colleges aren't doing what they normally would do.
- vouaobrasil 16d agoThe problem here is that AI isn't just a problem, it also revealed a problem: too much emphasis on publishing papers and churning out new results. The name of the game right now is just that: make something new and significant. AI itelf is a problem around the world right now because we've set up some seriously bad incentives. Same with art - it devolved into content creation for money, so AI snaps that up. What we need to do is make mathematics about understanding, rather than churning out results. People should be rewarded for reaching an ability to explain mathematics without the aid of computers, to teach people for the sake of their learning. I do think AI also needs to be eradicated because of its destructive properties, but I think that at the same time it also is a manifestation of the sickness in our society to go after the wrong incentives that are detrimental in the long run.
- in_absentia 16d ago> The problem here is that AI isn't just a problem, it also revealed a problem: too much emphasis on publishing papers and churning out new results. I wonder how it revealed it... oh, right, because AI labs rushed to churn out new results for marketing purposes. Mathematicians didn't make them do it. So I'm not sure it's really an indictment of the field. In fact, how often does mathematics feature in university press releases, how often do mathematicians compete for multi-million grants, how many of them are interviewed on TV?... This discipline is less afflicted by weird incentives than most other fields. It's mostly just a small clique of nerds publishing abstract "open source" work.
- fn-mote 16d ago> I do think AI also needs to be eradicated I wonder how life was while the Butlerian Jihad was raging through the universe. Jihadis were fighting opponents with thinking machines. Did they win because the machines were not capable enough? The idea that this genie is going back in the bottle is, imo, very wishful thinking. The thinking machines can rip off your software ideas completely, in days.
- coderenegade 15d agoThis. The value of intelligence and execution is plummeting towards zero for knowledge work. Right now, software and mathematics are the most affected, but the transition to every other industry is going to happen with shocking speed.
- sandworm101 16d agoThis is a simple matter of intellectual property. A tool or technique for doing a thing can be patented. A legal monopoly is granted to the originator. The public is made aware of the technique but is legally forbidden from using it for a period of years/decades.
- kelvo_ran 16d ago[dead]
- jan_m_savage 16d agoTalking about frontier mathematics? Even the common for-mere-mortals version of mathematics is totally inaccessible to most people. Even to those who want to really learn it. Take a good look at the textbooks that teach mathematics and tell me I am wrong.
- tintor 15d agoThere are many amazing Youtube channels that explain complex math well, for example https://www.youtube.com/c/3blue1brown https://www.youtube.com/c/3blue1brown
- jjgreen 15d ago... and quaternions?
- jan_m_savage 15d agoI am well aware of all the sites and YT, what you probably thought I live in a cave? I taught mathematics at Tsinghua for over a decade, so I know what I'm talking about. 3B1Br is great but only for a 'hobbyist'. There's no systematic progression to teach from A to Z. Also, you can't learn mathematics just by watching videos.
- nxpnsv 15d agoThe books exist and are possible to understand. They teach maths at most universities. You should try it, learning is fun.
- jan_m_savage 15d agoplease have a look at my profile before making silly comments. :)
- nxpnsv 15d agoI don't see how your profile possibly could make your point valid.
- niemandhier 15d agoIn science and math, too often only the final result gets credited or published. Maybe we should start crediting and publishing our intermediate results and attempts. Humans would gain credit for providing a part of the solution to tough problems, LLMs would profit from the resulting data flywheel.
- thaumasiotes 15d ago> In science and math, too often only the final result gets credited or published. > Maybe we should start crediting and publishing our intermediate results and attempts. All mathematical results are "intermediate results". What would it mean for something to be a final result?
- veunes 15d agoI think "final" here just means the unit that currently gets treated as publishable and credit-worthy: a theorem with a proof, a solved conjecture, a completed paper, etc
- jonathanstrange 15d agoIf it's not worth publishing, it's not a result at all. That being said, the problem really is that since LLMs excel at sifting through piles or papers, publishing more would aggravate the problem instead of alleviating it.
- mitxela 15d agoThen it's circular: "only the units that are publishable are published"
- veunes 15d ago[dead]
- tmsh 15d agoAll of life proceeds effectively with a right brain and a left brain. A fast loop and a slow loop. A general and a scout. A melody and a base. The evolutionary moments involve moving the melody into the base and making way for a new melody. But there is always an overseeing element and a work element. A manager or coach and an employee or athlete. It's just an effective pattern of growth. You see it everywhere in nature. In generations of animals and plant life (the more experienced parent, the growing child; the central 'brain' and the rest of the body; the queen ant and the ant colony; the trunk and the leaves). The friction in math right now is you have the fast moving melodic bits racing faster than the base can understand always or keep up with. So you start to need AI for both the left brain part that is executing and the right brain part that is synthesizing. That's just the friction right now. You reduce the friction by using AI to help with understanding AI and getting back to a more normal rhythm of scouting out (with AI) and (what is still developing more and more) synthesizing with AI.
- veunes 15d ago[dead]
- werdl 15d agoSeems rather a dramatic notion for a single incident... The simple short-term solution is just don't feed all your work into the IP theft machine?
- pfdietz 15d agoMathematical ideas and proofs are not IP.
- philprx 15d agoMake the proof from LLMs with the same constraints as human mathematicians have: The proof must be as succinct as possible so that it's reviewable. It's ok for the same LLM to publish repeatedly, but it's not Ok to drop a bulk 600kb Lean proof. The proof must build on other works that are similarly bite sized and published before (so that it's incrementally reviewed) The proof must be published as soon as fully formed, and not in bulk like current LLMs proofs.
- encyclopediai 15d agoThis will not happen. The fear comes from the real problem: publication as a measure. The mathematics itself will only benefit from the discovery of cross links from the human created literature. Think about these LLM as infinitely patient and very long attention experts in what was already done. So on one side, for a few years at least, it will become normal to publish tens of articles. The article inflation is what scares the present system. On the other side, after a while, when all the existing mathematical corpus will be mined and most of buried connections will be explored, we shall have a much more better foundation for future mathematics. It is very naive or misleading to think about mathematics as if it were chess or go. In few year these (future) tools will be in standard use.
- pfdietz 15d agoAs the famous British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead wrote 111 years ago, "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." This now includes the proving of theorems. He went on to write "Operations of thought are cavalry charges in a battle - they are limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments." Mechanization also demolished that institution, which had also survived for thousands of years.
- song_synth 15d agoI devised an algebraic representation of music composition. This enables me to mass produce musical scores without ever touching artificial intelligence. It took me 10 years to develop the system, and I intend to ride it out as much as I can. By act 3 of my life sure I will publish the math. But in this economy, I would be a damn fool to publish my equations just to let the LLMs write better music. https://monictheory.com/developer-api https://monictheory.com/developer-api
- kittikitti 15d agoCtrl + F, "open journals", 0 results. There has been an explosion of open access journals in the last decade. Is everyone basically LARPing on YCombinator?
- youoy 15d agoPart of the controversy here is that now the skill advantage that some Field Medalist had is much narrower. The fact that fields medals have an age limit implies that it favors brain power over understanding. And that was the guiding light award of the community. So i find it "funny" (and natural) when they are offended by AI. That is the main "crisis" of mathematics. In my opinion there has never been a better time to be a mathematitian, and there has never been a better time to be a software builder. But there has never been a worst time to have the need to prove your economic value as a mathematitian or software developer alone. Because "understanding" is not something you can prove in one afternoon, its something that you prove with a life.