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muragekibicho • today at 3:46 PM • 10 replies • view on HN

I think a lot about how Terrence Tao and the usual 30 (already well-funded) math guys will receive this cash while us early-career math students are left holding the bag.

It's akin somewhat to "donating 100 dollars to the node JS foundation, not the packages that appear when you run npm fund".


Replies

schrototo • today at 3:52 PM

But it's not like those guys will just pocket that money. They will use it like all academic grant money is used: to hire PhD students and postdocs.

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rdhyee • today at 5:06 PM

I'm curious what you as an early-career math student would want the Simon Foundation to do differently from what it says it will do. I hope there is a way for students like to you to get a slice of the pie.

bko • today at 5:26 PM

Why are you "holding the bag" You're early career math students. I know a lot of industries that would love to hire you.

Even if you want to work in research, AI offers a lot of opportunities to do even more research, and less grunt work

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cyanydeez • today at 6:22 PM

Isn't that basically all of AI for white collar workers?

I haven't escape note that I can do tons of things with AI because I spent the last 10 years building a bunch of side projects and now I can complete those side projects because I know all the magic words.

Gonna need to unionize because the gerontology is just getting stronger.

random3 • today at 4:01 PM

As much as this looks like a math problem, it's actually an everyone problem. Some hands-on (literally) have more way to go, but otherwise this is a "hop" that the entire society needs to cross. Honestly, I don't think there's going to be be any Math 2.0 as there won't be any other 2.0, at least not in any utilitarian way and the effort to find utility where there's none is misguided at best. The analogy I like to make is that with horses trying to find utility y in the Ford era.

It's also not an OpenAI, Anthropic or any specific name caused problem. This type of progress has always been happening, it's more or less coincidental (like Stigler's law). The problem though is we need to rethink how we operate as a society and too few (IMO) are trying to make this conversation happen.

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vonneumannstan • today at 5:31 PM

>I think a lot about how Terrence Tao and the usual 30 (already well-funded) math guys will receive this cash while us early-career math students are left holding the bag.

Never understood this sentiment. Theses top researchers could do almost anything else with their skills outside Academia and make far far more money. You don't get rich off grants... They could all presumably walk into Anthropic or OpenAI for near $1M a year in TC.

If you yourself are as cracked as you think you could also do the same...

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mi_lk • today at 4:09 PM

Maybe you get conditioned on how the rich usually treats other people, but this view isn't well supported by healthy discussions among the math community wrt recent AI 'disruption'

bretnach • today at 4:00 PM

[dead]

prodigycorp • today at 3:54 PM

Ha, reminds me of how anthropic publishes their math papers with meat proxy math professors who were compensated for their "authorship" of the paper.

Essentially gifts for the annointed.

danielmarkbruce • today at 4:35 PM

You never had some god given right to be a math researcher. You have a big brain and training in a field that is very useful in various industries.

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