Yet another Hacker News

How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?

33 points jjgreen 2 days ago 11 comments

cyanydeez 1 day ago | parent

wouldn't it be dystopian secrecy cause a flock camera is equally capable of watching the mathematicians as it is the public citizens.

kakacik 47 minutes ago | parent

Maybe mathematicians are smart enough to never ever buy such piece of shit on higher principle, regardless of their actual fiasco?

rramadass 1 day ago | parent

> Regardless of the true cost, it seems that professional mathematicians now need to wary about what they put into a LLM and think hard about how to disclose and publish a result.

This is all but guaranteed now.

Mathematicians/Scientists/Researchers need to stop sharing freely with "AI Companies" and have explicit clauses in place in their publications about not using their research without their explicit consent.

There should be a clear legal distinction between using research data for AI model-training vs. another researcher using it.

Come up with a legal framework, establish procedures for sharing and using others work and have a single scientific body in charge of enforcing it.

JMKH42 43 minutes ago | parent

The USA doesn't have legal frameworks any more, you just buy and sell the right to do what you want. Even our supreme court is disingenuous now.

nradov 31 minutes ago | parent

Just putting a clause in a publication won't prevent it from being used as training data. Information wants to be free.

The frontier LLM vendors do sell enterprise licenses which contractually guarantee that your prompts won't be used for training. (Maybe they'll secretly violate the agreement but in principle it's legally enforceable.) Scholars and universities who care about credit and attribution will either have to purchase those licenses or run their own private open-weight LLM instances.

Analemma_ 21 minutes ago | parent

I don't like this and I wish it weren't true, but I think the period of "information wants to be free" is coming to an end, it was a relic of a bygone era. Increasingly, making your information free means you're the sucker who is doing free labor for AI companies, or worse, you're helping your competitors. Paywalls, login walls, and rate-limits are going up everywhere: there's the GitLab news on the home page right now, and sites like Twitter, Reddit etc. which used to be publicly-readable are now gated (and Xitter is using the legal system to shut down any bypasses).

I hate this but I don't think there's any going back now that LLMs exist.

pavel_lishin 17 minutes ago | parent

"Information wants to be free" never meant that people want to release their information; it meant that information is very hard to keep secret, and that everything leaks like a sieve, and especailly that once it's out, it's out forever.

sobiolite 7 minutes ago | parent

Would this legal framework cut both ways? When AI companies use AI to make and publish mathematical discoveries, would they be able to legally prevent professional mathematicians from using them?

perching_aix 42 minutes ago | parent

I'd guess universities might starting hosting open source models. They can probably actually afford to, unlike individual mathematicians.

Though maybe if there's a flurry of math-optimized agents coming up, like there are small coding agents, those might be feasible to host personally.

ndriscoll 40 minutes ago | parent

Simple: if you don't publish your work, we don't fund you. Why is this even a question?

optimiz3 34 minutes ago | parent

Similar principle applies to open source or any other creative endeavor put in the public domain.