[ExI] The Mathocalypse

[John Clark]

*My prediction that 2025 would be the last normal year is looking a lot
more likely today than it was yesterday. Scott Alexander has some
interesting things to say about today's momentous developments in
mathematics.*



*"Experience has shown that, even now, there will still be people
explaining in patronizing tones why none of this is real and none of it
counts. If such people were capable of being impressed by anything that
happens in the empirical world, of updating on anything, they would've
already been impressed and already updated several years ago, long before
things had reached the point of an actual Mathocalypse.*

*So, they'll say, maybe the alleged solutions are not solutions at all, but
just "AI slop." Or maybe none of the 372 well-known open problems that were
solved were real math problems, they were all just glorified contest
puzzles and trivialities. (After all, there's still no Riemann Hypothesis!)
Or maybe the entire 4000-year-old discipline of mathematics needs to be
jettisoned: turns out that it was all just puzzle-solving and trivialities;
all that's different is that now the triviality stands unmasked. In any
case, what really matters is that the true inner sanctum of human
creativity hasn't been breached and probably never will be, and also, that
Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are contemptible little nerds.*

*If you're still a proponent of that doomed worldview, still aboard the
sinking ship, I encourage you in the strongest possible terms to read
yesterday's other great contribution to AI discourse, besides the OpenAI
Mathocalypse dump: namely, Scott Alexander's open letter to Steven Pinker
<http://scottaaronson.blog/?action=user_content_redirect&uuid=dcb39bff44aa4afad8c3c17d1b0f91263431c40a70c8daabe6ef5e4f821e404d&blog_id=129520580&post_id=10169&user_id=0&subs_id=317430890&signature=f69c6af8bf0bb2d171428655729bccd5&email_name=new-post&user_email=johnkclark@gmail.com&encoded_url=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYXN0cmFsY29kZXh0ZW4uY29tL3AvYW4tb3Blbi1sZXR0ZXItdG8tc3RldmVuLXBpbmtlci1vbg=&email_id=5c37c21a7c7cda9146ed9435ca6e9abb>.
I feel some responsibility for this, as the person who first introduced
Steven Pinker to the existence of the rationalist community, and who also
first introduced Steven Pinker and Scott Alexander to one another (they had
both been fans of each other's writing). And now Scott is challenging Steve
to a literal duel, with guns!*

*For whatever it's worth: Steve is a lifelong intellectual hero of mine,
just as he is for Scott, and I also have to privilege of calling Steve my
friend. But I found Scott's post to be one of the most devastating
rejoinders to anything that I've ever read. And I thought Scott's
conclusion was exactly right: when it comes to AI risk, Steve’s great
challenge is now to accept and start using a more “Pinkerite” epistemology.*
------------------------------

*Last night, while I should've been poring over some of OpenAI's hundreds
of papers and/or writing this post, I decided to spend some time with my
kids instead. They wanted a movie night, so I suggested something they'd
never seen before (and that I hadn't seen for decades), and that seemed
chock-full of no-nonsense, practical guidance for the world in which
they're going to grow up: Terminator 2.*

*For those who are wondering: apparently, the AI model that produced all
these wonders was not bespoke contraption of 10,000 agents burning millions
of dollars worth of compute, as was used for example to construct a
finite-time blowup for the Navier-Stokes equations. Instead, it was simply
the latest internal OpenAI model---one that might be released to paying
ChatGPT customers within the next couple of months, depending on the
recommendations of OpenAI's safety board! (My 9-year-old son: "Oh
they definitely shouldn't release that. If it could solve all those math
problems, it can't possibly be safe.") Apparently they used about 3 hours
of GPT-Pro level compute on average per problem solved."*


*For more of Scott's thoughts about this see: *


*The Mathocalypse <https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10169#respond>*

*John K Clark*
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