From the article linked below:
“OpenAI’s Sam Altman … sparked an existential crisis in the field (of mathematics) by releasing hundreds of AI-generated solutions to math problems that haven’t been solved by humans … but this doesn’t seem to bother Altman all that much”
" … he acknowledged the disruption that OpenAI was causing to mathematicians, but said that the work must continue — for the good of humankind, he argued."
“OpenAI’s explosive foray into math started when it claimed to have found a solution to the famous Navier-Stokes problem by using 10,000 AI agents that worked 88 hours straight.”
“A (human) mathematician (working on the same problem) accused OpenAI of unfairly piggy-backing off his unreleased research and threatening to ruin his career.”
Mathematicians complained that " … wealthy AI companies could now jump on someone else’s ongoing research and beat them to the finish line by throwing ungodly amounts of AI computing power at the problem, and then take credit for it."
“OpenAI had spent around $10 million just to come up with its Navier-Stokes solution.”
“It will take years for mathematicians to unpack all the AI-generated proofs OpenAI has dumped on their laps, while OpenAI, in the here and now, gets to use them as purported proof of their technology being revolutionary.”
Altman replied “I feel unequivocal on this point: Humanity deserves fundamental knowledge, and we should not be sitting on a major fundamental science discovery,” he said. “The world deserves that.”
Well, when we hear about somebody losing their job to a machine, we most likely think first of the factory worker who loses his job to a mechanical device that can do his job faster and better.
But it seems that applies to math professors, and, most likely, to other white collar type jobs as well.
But as I said in this thread’s title, “OT (or not?).”
For example, what if we had to chose between two possibilities:
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a human medical researcher working endlessly, it would seem, in his laboratory, trying for years to find the cure for cancer, or
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a computer, outfitted with an excellent program, sifting through mounds of data, which because of its bulk is beyond any human’s capacity to analyze, and finds a cancer cure in an hour.
Wouldn’t we without hesitation go the computer route?
Surely no reasonable person would object to that. Let’s find the cure as quickly as possible, and by any means, and save lives!
And let there be no human Luddites here! If ever there was a situation where computers were here to help, and not to eliminate jobs, this would be it!
Although perhaps it’s not unreasonable to feel a little sympathy for the math professor who has spent years of his life trying to solve a problem, and then a computer comes along and solves it in an hour.
But maybe that seems to be where the modern world is headed in a lot of cases.