Hacker News

> The foundation will manage and award the funding, including through an open call for proposals, to support workshops and initiatives that help researchers evaluate recent AI-assisted results, learn and use new tools, share perspectives and shape collective standards for AI use.

A non-zero amount of it is probably going directly to the AI companies through tokens...

This is legit akin to "trickle down" which never works because people are selfish.

The joys of trickle-down economy...

> to hire PhD students and postdocs

Why? I thought we already established* that most professional mathematicians are not necessary (in the near future, then maybe "any"), so why would they doom these students with pity grants to basically create unnecessary jobs for them? More practically, wouldn't that money be best served (i.e., raw ROI) by purchasing more tokens on the frontier models?

(*) The existence of this effort itself is a good heuristic.

Ha ha ha

And blog in favor of AI ...

in the age of AI? are you _....sure_

That's like saying "if you want to work as a chef, DoorDash delivery offers the ability to order lots of meals". The new jobs are both fewer and shittier.

I hope the future you built for others is imposed on you too.

You cannot use mathematics without understanding it.

It doesn't help you that AI understands it, when you don't. You are the one getting screwed over by others who understand statistics better than you do.

When you're rich enough, you can pay others (or AI) to protect you. But then you're dependent upon them.

So, under a transactional model of social relationships, you are in an arms race over raw intelligence and competency/data. With only one winner, who takes all in the end.

Logically, most people have already lost in that game, so why keep playing that nonsense?

That also means that you will need buy-in from a plurality/majority of that society to make that "hop". This is not going to break politically this election cycle, but it will show up. Barring a 2008 level event, it will likely be the issue with the greatest growth heading into 2028, and that will place the impetus on the "specific name"s to communicate how this isn't just trickle down benefits. Especially when it will be an easy sell to people that the "hop" means real people falling into the gap or getting left behind. They need to figure out a way to make the distribution of benefits more immediate and tangible to everyday folks, because the perception of the distributed costs is a very easy sell in this political environment, regardless of the reality. I can't imagine that getting better over the next two years.

too few are talking about reshaping society because those in power are not letting that happen. the amount of wealth concentrated at the top is staggering and allows them to fortify their position by bribing, buying governments and media.

No, it's not an "everyone" problem yet. Each field is likely on its own timeline. Knowing how well AI is at proving theorems is of only limited use for predicting what will happen and when in other fields.

I love how "society" is investing billions to develop a tech that makes its own citizens obsolete, but doesn't manage to provide basic healthcare, housing or infrastructure...

Getting your foot in the door is always the first step. Sure, you can be as cracked as you want. You can be mediocre as well. None of that matters if you don't have a foundation to start from.

We're not so far from 'you never had some god given right to be alive, well fed and sheltered. You have a good body, make yourself useful in some industry.'

It is right in TFA:

The foundation was an early backer of machine learning for science, including funding the development of the Lean proof assistant, which has revolutionized how mathematicians work and made AI-assisted proofs possible. Additionally, the foundation has convened workshops, lectures and collaborations that have brought mathematicians together to explore and discuss AI’s role in the field.

arXiv, where BigAI trains from.

I did not. I certainly didn't know they were one of the USA's largest charitable foundations!

Propaganda of what?

This IS me going beyond the surface. The obvious question here is "who is this foundation and are they working with the AI labs". I answered both.

The headline in this piece made it look like maybe a foundation was trying to help mathematician's push back against the unwanted assault on their profession by the AI labs. The section I quoted shows that's not the case.

Also not sure how you interpreted "foundation started by the Renaissance Technology hedge fund billionaire" as a mindless boost.

The bottleneck now is human understanding.

Ironically, that has been that way for most people since forever.

Comparing with the situation in programming, where code evaluation (obviously analogous to "understanding") is that bottleneck now, should get people the idea of being in the same boat.

Did you read any of the explanations from mathematicians over the last month? What part of them do you disagree with?

For example [1]:

> In many fields and activities, years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas. However, building on a vast body of previous human work, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of producing the results of such work directly, and these goals cease to align.

Or [2]:

> Use of AI tools, when done responsibly, can support not just the initial generation of a solution, but all of the valuable followup activities that traditionally flow out of that solution. But at the current time, the opposite is often occurring: problems are being solved autonomously by AI prompters who have no interest in the broader field itself once their initial target is "solved", and do not understand the AI output well enough to answer questions on the result, give talks, or otherwise interact with the rest of the field.

> ...

> solutions to open problems are now being harvested at large scale in an unsustainable fashion, leaving entire fields of mathematics much less fertile than when such problems were solved in the traditional "Math 1.0" fashion.

[1]: https://mathandai.org/

[2]: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117395268130901862

> must be at least a good chunk of it

I’m in the funding markets around this stuff. Nobody took this into account. It’s more for PR with government and potential hires (and maybe some corporate marketing).

Suggesting all the other are dummies? And even if that is what you are suggesting, wouldn't that make them the group that needs support the least?

But it's entirely up to humans whether or not higher mathematical thought ceases due to lazy over reliance on AI.

Just because AI is capable of churning out vomit inducing prose, doesn't mean we need to surrender to a future filled with it. Humans who actually care about what they're doing will use AI when and where it should be used. I trust the intelligence, curiosity and tenacity of mathematicians to learn to work with AI. I don't understand the sky is falling worst case scenario Tao and others seem to be taking as the most likely future.

This reprioritization of math would release a tremendous amount of human capital to do other more productive things other than posing yet another abstract puzzle which may or may not have an use in a few hundred years. It's not even clear if the human race can survive until then nor is it justified to spend that resource researching that far ahead instead of just when we need it.

Wouldn't that be developers?

In some way, yes. The whole situation seems completely grounded in that mathematicians are greedy for status and clout trying to write their name on new discoveries in blood and publish as many papers as possible. And now they are sad because they lost their way to this status.

When you remove this greed and status seeking you might actually end up with a healthy environment.

Except that even the Cosa Nostra is less anti-human than the current tech bros and their foundation fronts.

You really cannot see any difference between the government and corporations supporting something? This "things have always been that way" talking point is getting out of hand.

Is it even subsidy after the training? One could argue scientific papers are a huge fraction of the reason LLMs are good

Genuinely the least they could do for what a pox they are on so many industries, on consumers of electronics, on local municipalities, on the environment...

Seems fair when the same companies pilfer public goods like physical infrastructure and our internet privacy.

And herein lies the rub: As others have pointed out in another active thread on AI in mathematics: The crisis could be described as one of career, status, and funding vs the general concept of the field. We have now circled back to question of who deserves these tokens!

Google will give free tokens to 10,000 scientists:

https://ai.google/gemini-for-science/

Sure, everyone's a scientist now.

We will only give the free tokens to the top X% of scientists, which is now a much smaller pool and you are unlikely to be considered LLMs or not.

no i'm sciencing i want my victory tokens and your victory tokens and your victory peptides too 15.10.26 hn ref uncareer doubleplusungood rectify

I belive that the world would be in a much better place if all science was ultimately funded by a global organization such as UN and patents did not exist. If you are a research group that successfully creates something worth replicating then you should be eligable to receive a grant as well as request grants for projects that cost billions of dollars.

There is some success with this kind of strategy already when it comes to space, LHS and ITER come to mind. NASA is somewhat operating on this very same principle although it is a government organization to begin with.

Although the opposite reaction is that you should keep people behind inventions poor to encourage them to create more inventions which ultimately what ends up happening in the real world more often than not. The people who revolutioned the world did get fame and glory, including numerous monetary compensation packages - but compared to the people who sold those inventions they only got a tiny fraction of a fraction, this is especially clear with people who are normal employees and inventions are credited to a company rather than the few people who made it possible.

May be instead of funding military or other countries, they can fund scientist.. And all the tax funded must be in public domain instead of giving it to private companies.