logoalt Hacker News

GPersontoday at 4:46 PM1 replyview on HN

There is no value in your technique when 2 months, or 6 months, or 2 years from now the model will improve. There is no skill in suggesting to double check work. Everything you did could be trivially automated with today’s models anyway, as you are aware. Taking credit is trying to pretend you had some meaningful role here.

It is a distinction without a difference because I want to live in a world where people get to fill their lives with meaningful things, and are not forced into Uber delivery driving jobs just because rich people like you think it’s fun to put their name next to something other people made prestigious.

Edit I apologize to Dan Abramov for venting my frustrations about things outside of either of our control and unfairly using him as a punching bag. He seems to be an intelligent person and I hope he continues learning mathematics using whatever tools he sees fit, including AI. It was wrong of me to do this and I will take a break from this website for one week.


Replies

danabramovtoday at 4:58 PM

I'm not sure it is trivially automatable with today's models since they get "carried away" too much, and I'm not sure there's a good way to prevent the supervisor from drifting. But I would like somebody to attempt that, which is part of the reason for my posting. If someone can automate whatever I was doing, it should be possible to get to deeper results than current models allow. Or maybe the next models would just be that good, I don't know.

Re: "rich", I've essentially spent $400 on this (in subsidized subscriptions), plus my free time being a mindless drone. Given that you assume my role is automatable, it sounds like this is relatively accessible to anyone with $400 (as long as AI companies continue subsidizing the frontier models). I don't think I've had some kind of an unfair advantage beyond that. If anything, a proper mathematician would probably be able to derive the result much faster with the same tools.

I don't know how the broad availability of these tools (to mathematicians and non-mathematicians alike) will change the field, what is considered prestigious, what work gets funding, how it affects the pipeline, etc. You seem to be implying that even testing the limits of these tools, or at least publishing the results obtained with them, is unethical in itself, even though it is broadly accessible now. I can understand this point of view.