After Math

Defined something like: temporary state of complete loss of personal purpose and the experience of existential dread from never achieving self-actualization in spite of the tremendous time commitment towards excellence in a now automated intelligence.

I truly think because of the pace of innovation this will be a universal feeling for every human for the rest of existence.

As a software engineer, I myself have only recently recovered from it. So, it’s really interesting to watch a prominent figure in their industry publicly go through “purpose death” and the related grief.

I’d say Terrance has recently left the denial phase, the anger phase I’m sure he wisely kept to off the Internet, and is currently in the bargaining phase - ie scrambling to change the goal posts. I wonder if he will wisely keep the depressions / burnout phases also off the internet.

However, soon as the goalposts keep falling I think like most humans he will accept, retool, and come out of this grief with renewed purpose with larger expectations of himself and mathematics. This recent post even starts towards some of that - but sadly is slightly off the mark.

“The important question is, therefore, not whether AI will defeat mathematicians, but which mathematical ends we want AI to serve.”

He still thinks there is controlling AI. AI will run and trample anything that stays in front of it. He needs to one day find acceptance in letting AI run while he learns how to suggest it minor course corrections which it may or may not accept, and when it doesn’t accept quickly learn from the AI why he was right or wrong.

25 Field Medalist and 5000+ mathematicians from leading institutions around the world endorsed an open letter expressing concerns about the impact of AI on mathematics:

https://www.mathandai.org/

More than 1,900+ mathematicians have also shown concern over the Caltech Mathathon:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IL0b2oG2KvvSnxn_DuXsNxuH...

James Maynard, a Fields Medalist, has also publicly expressed concerns about the implications of AI for mathematics:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/R9VQnNv5SoI

This subjective attitude turns mathematics into nothing more than number-poetry.

That would reduce mathematics to something very pathetic.

Focus instead on attribution. Yes, OpenAI took the last tiny step in the process of solving this problem (= proving it). But it cannot attribute credit to all the mathematicians whose chat logs from the past few months were fed into its training data. Unlike a human, it can't even remember where it learned things from! For many theorems, I can still recall which exposition was the one that "sank in" for me (often not the first one!) a decade after grad school.

In my mind, this makes current LLMs unfit to deserve any credit at all -- they cannot give credit to others, so they and their owners deserve no credit themselves. OpenAI's LLM took the last tiny step, but not any of the important ones.