AI Is Turning Math Into a Secretive Arms Race, Warns Terence Tao
How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?
Mathematics is reverting to its medieval era of secrecy as AI companies spend millions to solve famous problems for PR. Terence Tao warns that even rumors of progress trigger massive AI-powered efforts, incentivizing researchers to hide promising directions. The author proposes requiring human credit and full methodology disclosure to prevent long-term damage to open science.
It is now the identification of a promising problem which is the scarce and precious resource. We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential.
- lacker
I 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.
- niemandhier
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.
Humans would gain credit for providing a part of the solution to tough problems, LLMs would profit from the resulting data flywheel.
- Ancalagon
anyone else already experiencing this in a corporate environment? I know I am. Its not just between teams either, its within them.
- jan_m_savage
Talking 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.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
you 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
We 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.
- roosterIllusi0n
Universities 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.
- optimiz3
Similar principle applies to open source or any other creative endeavor put in the public domain.