Mathematicians, as far as I understand, respect the humanities, and would be crushed if it responded to our current crisis with the kind of open contempt we've seen from other crowds. I hope that this tweet is merely more of Yglesias' quippy idiocy

I agree with this, but also think it’s important people do not become accultured to being abusive towards anything, because if they talk to machines a lot, they get accustomed to talking to people that way too. I think there’s already even been studies on this w/Alexa, Siri, etc.

TERENCE TAO “My feelings on recent developments are very mixed and complex. On the one hand, many of the AI-generated proofs appear to introduce clever new ideas that will be fruitful once digested, while also building upon the existing contributions of countless human mathematicians past and present. But at the same time, I am deeply frustrated that, in sharp contrast to traditional breakthroughs, none of the humans involved in these proofs are available to take questions, give talks, attend conferences, submit papers to journals, train students, or otherwise participate in the subsequent development of these results. Similarly, I am excited by the possibility of the community being able to use these tools to tackle ambitious and large-scale projects that one could not have even dreamed of in the past. But I am horrified by the many person-years of ongoing patient and deliberately slow research efforts – particularly by graduate students and postdocs – towards many motivating problems in mathematics being casually disrupted or destroyed by such a release. Much as one cannot unhear a movie spoiler or a crossword clue, one cannot explore a problem as profitably and richly once one is aware of an existing solution. Yes, one can still analyze and digest such an answer; but the best opportunity to do so is at the moment of its discovery, and such moments are increasingly wasted when delegated entirely to AI tools. And I mourn the path not taken, and the opportunities lost in the frantic race to develop this technology. Labs submitting their frontier models to independent researchers for proper scientific evaluation. Coordination with the research community to ensure these tools are applied to complement and enhance the abilities and activities of human researchers, rather than compete with them. Use of these tools to foster collaboration and sharing, rather than competition and secrecy. Opening new doors, without closing old ones. But that is not the path we now find ourselves in. Instead, the community needs to come together more than ever. To clearly declare our own standards and values, to build our own tools and practices, to support our most vulnerable members, and to chart our own path forward. Let’s get to work.”

I’m starting to get increasingly uncomfortable with the economics of AI as it is currently happening It seems fundamentally wrong that a small number of people with access to a huge amounts of VC money can vacuum up all the contributions of humanity, often paying nothing for it, then turn around and get enormously rich while the many people who put all the work into creating the training data get nothing I am generally pro-AI, but the way it is happening is seeming increasingly parasitic to me

@PyrosAI @TaliaRinger You are misplacing your ire. In my experience, the math community has always shown significantly higher-than-average solidarity with artists going through similar struggles. Why do you think math profs were the people telling creatives to “adapt”? This is just so untrue

One thing I'm realizing about alignment research is that I have a strong distaste for most alignment work done by people with value systems I disagree with. Which makes sense: the values someone holds are intensely relevant to their alignment work, which is all about values

I have plenty of worries, but the coolest thing by far about the LLM era for PL research has been the ease with which we can now make tools that are actually usable. Used to have no time for really nice VSCode plugins and whatnot, but that stuff is perfect for Claude Code