Trump Rails Against AI Slowdown "Hoax"

Nathaniel Whittemore (0:00)

In the wake of Dario Amadei's note about Pacing the Frontier, published this weekend, and the corresponding agreement from the other lab leaders, there is now a shift in the conversation to figure out where we go next. On the one hand, some folks are getting more nuanced, trying to break apart questions of whether we should be having a debate about AI risks and the best way to place guardrails around them and to involve society and the decision-making of the AI labs from questions of the specific proposals that the labs are bringing to that effect. And then there is the partisan wrecking ball, the thundering cataclysm of congressional calls for regulation, and of course, an absolute torrent of truth social posts.

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Prominent mathematician Terence Tao has led 25 field medalists in an open letter objecting to AI companies engaging with academic mathematics. It seems like so long ago, but prior to the middle of last week, the biggest conversation in AI was about OpenAI solving a Millennium Prize problem. NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster, who had been working on the problem over the past year using AI tools, questioned whether OpenAI could have accessed his logs to scoop the prize. OpenAI denied accessing the logs and also claimed to have made significant progress on a second Millennium Prize problem. With rumors swirling that Anthropic had solved yet another problem, there is a meaningful prospect that three of the six outstanding problems could be solved this year. These problems have stood for decades as the pinnacle achievement in the field. So it is unsurprising that an AI solving them is raising big questions about research mathematics more broadly.

On Friday, fields medalist Terence Tao led 25 of his peers in signing an open letter called A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics. The misalignment they pointed to was not between AI and humanity, but between the AI companies and the scientific fields they're entering. The mathematicians wrote, Over the last few months, the mathematical capabilities of LLMs have improved dramatically, to the point that they can solve major outstanding problems in many fields of mathematics. However, the push by AI companies to solve mathematical problems as a benchmark is detrimental to the science of mathematics and to the mathematical community. The goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathematical community are severely misaligned. We see these as part of broader alignment issues impacting other scientific and creative professions, as well as the whole of society. Now, some view this statement as lamenting a loss of status among mathematicians. Solving a millennium prize problem makes one a shoe-in for the Fields Medal, which is the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in mathematics. Yet, when you dig in, the letter was more about how automating scientific progress undermines the entire endeavor. The letter stated, Famous problems have often served as landmarks and lighthouses against which one can measure an improved understanding of this landscape. Solving one of these problems has been a certain sign of new insights and interesting methods, which would then be studied by a community of mathematicians through a long and arduous process of talks, discussions, simplifications. Some of the mathematical ideas pursue their journey even further to become, decades or centuries after, tools that are understood and used by the whole population. The letter expressed a concern about students being trained to think deeply about unsolved problems, about AI companies rushing to publish a result in order to beat humans working on the same problem, and even the field of mathematics itself. The mathematicians wrote, Solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight. Forgetting this in the world of AI may turn the tool against the primary goal. Indeed, the mass production at faster and faster pace of true-false statements could destroy fertile ground instead of breathing life into new ideas.

Ultimately, the mathematicians who signed the letter framed their small corner of academia as a microcosm for broader human society and one that is being disrupted quite early compared to most fields. They wrote, We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work, with misalignment between the outcome of the use of AI and its initial purpose. In many fields and activities, years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas. However, building on a vast body of previous human work, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of producing the results of such work directly and these goals cease to align. The issues the mathematical community faces now are similar to issues that other scientific and creative professions are facing and indicate issues that all of humanity might face. How to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what the work was meant to achieve in the first place. Ultimately, the letter acknowledged that AI is here to stay and is, in fact, extraordinarily beneficial for the difficult work of research mathematicians. Terence Tao himself has been a slow convert to AI-assisted mathematics. He saw relatively little promise in the technology until recently, but has now adapted his process to make better use of the tools. Now, some rejected this out of hand. Eric Weinstein wrote, I'll start who is part of this so-called mathematical community. Am I? Because anyone who follows me knows I've been warning about this kind of unwanted priesthood holding back the mathematics community by pretending to speak for all of us, and I'll be inviting the AI savages in.