Yet another Hacker News

"I'm on a war footing": Terry Tao and the crisis in math

45 points vinipolicena 2 days ago 39 comments

ViktorRay 54 minutes ago | parent

I find it interesting that, several years ago when discussing AI, folks used to focus on how automation would first come for blue collar work. Things like driving being automated and truck drivers replaced. And then eventually on the horizon we would see things like this.

But we still have no self driving cars. Seems like the automation came by in the opposite direction. Perhaps driving will actually be the final thing automated.

JLO64 49 minutes ago | parent

> But we still have no self driving cars

While I agree with your statement overall, as someone who drives everyday in LA alongside Waymos without anyone inside of them I must disagree with this aspect of it.

SchemaLoad 27 minutes ago | parent

We still have no general self driving cars. What we have is a bunch of geofenced tests. While we are closer than ever, we are still seemingly a long way away from truck drivers being obsolete was foretold over 10 years ago now.

reilly3000 23 minutes ago | parent

“General” would mean winter driving and I’m not aware of any large-scale tests of things like icy conditions on hills.

Edit: nevermind. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/waymo-toronto-winter-self-d...

amelius 12 minutes ago | parent

A better formulation would be: we don't know if we have self-driving cars.

Because if it became fashionable for pedestrians to wear large green dresses with red balls, and everybody would wear that, we have no idea what the AI would do.

bluefirebrand 48 minutes ago | parent

Driving is actually regulated.

Something I'm noticing a lot is that automation finds easy footholds in unregulated industries because there's no basis to push back on it. And there's a lot more tolerance for poor quality work in unregulated industries too.

mattnewton 45 minutes ago | parent

An LLM automating web developers with 99% success rate saves the company millions of dollars and allows them to launch products and features faster.

A truck or a car that has a 99% success rate would be the top threat to society and quickly rise to the leading cause of death under 30 if widely deployed.

numbsafari 23 minutes ago | parent

Examples?

Legend2440 8 minutes ago | parent

>quickly rise to the leading cause of death under 30 if widely deployed.

Wait, aren't human-driven cars already the leading cause of death under 30?

BurningFrog 40 minutes ago | parent

I have a self driving Tesla, as do many others.

HoldOnAMinute 34 minutes ago | parent

(Supervised)

fliglr 37 minutes ago | parent

Driving is heavily regulated, and there are a million interest groups lining up to sue to stop self-driving. Imagine all the people who make their money from car crashes, for example.

za_creature 36 minutes ago | parent

Broadly speaking, this is proof that there will be no jobs coming after AI.

All past inventions have put some of the most miserable humans out of a job. Farming by hand is hard, so is copying books and don't even get me started on the dullness of making clothes by hand.

Driving all day isn't all that far off, though still much better than the above and definitely better than riding horses all day.

Telegraph operators? Hell no. Dude sitting in an elevator all day? No thanks.

It's always been from the other end. This time around, there's gonna be some 10-20 years of robot manufacturing, then a universal lifetime of robots fighting misaligned robots until enough paperclips have been manufactured.

Or you know, we block out the sun and live in caves or whatever you fancy.

layer8 28 minutes ago | parent

The physical world is still more difficult and messy than discrete logic (theorems, software).

dyauspitr 27 minutes ago | parent

> But we still have no self driving cars.

Do you live under a rock?

avazhi 23 minutes ago | parent

Uh, they aren’t trustworthy and they aren’t fully autonomous. So no, we indeed do not.

eecks 18 minutes ago | parent

0 self driving cars in my country

skybrian 24 minutes ago | parent

It seems fairer to say that the Waymo fleet has >4,000 driverless cars [1]. There is still a long way to go, but it's rising.

[1] https://pages.skybrian.com/2026/waymo-robotaxi-fleet/

bossyTeacher 10 minutes ago | parent

> folks used to focus on how automation would first come for blue collar work

Developers are guilty of hubris and they are getting slapped back to reality.

bagacrap 53 minutes ago | parent

https://archive.li/0LTWn

zer00eyz 51 minutes ago | parent

> They “used math for what they needed, which was to evaluate their models,”

OAI first paper on the prize was a pretty shitty thing to do. But the rest of this looks like they are just mining the corpus and taking a brute force approach to do it.

Im going to say this again, the "pure math" academic types need to get a grip. Plenty of your peers got PHD's and happily made a fortune in finance, while screwing the world (See 2008 housing bubble) and none of you said a peep about that.

spiderfarmer 24 minutes ago | parent

Plenty of welders made weaponry that killed babies and none of the famous DIY Youtubers spoke out against that either.

typedef_struct 34 minutes ago | parent

TLDR: "I didn't understand this proof and there is no one to explain it to me"

ademup 27 minutes ago | parent

The TLDR seems perhaps tongue-in-cheek, but it's a worthy thought: the situation where our best experts find new science to be inscrutable is close at hand, if not here now.

Humans have been guilty of burying things we don't understand for millenia. Will we continue to do so "because AI"?

throwyawayyyy 25 minutes ago | parent

Has OpenAI shared any new interesting _problems_? I.e. do more than strip-mine mathematics, as said in the article, but said: "Here is a question I cannot answer, it's interesting for this and that reason, I believe it's true for this and that reason, it's beyond me though, have at it." Has that happened yet?

arjie 20 minutes ago | parent

AFAIK it has not happened.

Considering that this is where the mathematician excels over machine wouldn’t that only offer a new view from such a mathematician that “OpenAI has rapaciously stolen from mathematics that last dignity: of choosing worthy problems”? Perhaps with sufficient effort the community of mathematicians may yet forestall such an effort.

magicalist 13 minutes ago | parent

> wouldn’t that only offer a new view from such a mathematician

Don't invent things to get mad about, please.

arjie 23 minutes ago | parent

> Much as one cannot unhear a movie spoiler or a crossword clue, one cannot explore a problem as profitably and richly once one is aware of an existing solution

Certainly, it’s like being made aware of cheat codes to video games: One doesn’t enjoy the game as much after but surely knowing something is true means you can find many other things that come from the pathway to it now that you know it’s true. Lots of science and tech is like this where someone shows something is doable and then people find better ways to do it but until that person showed it was doable there was no progress.

> I am horrified by the many person-years” of research, particularly by young mathematicians, “being casually disrupted or destroyed,” he wrote.

That’s what technology does. And he might be upset but we’re the ones paying for it and frankly, I’m happier to have more questions answered than for fewer answered but in an artisanal fashion.

Most notable is the fact that the released facts are like “treated waste”. But if the question was worth answering and the value is only in a good answer and not simply a correct answer, then the value has simply not been realized.

But that feels strange then that the value is in the good answer, not just a right answer and yet one finds oneself unable to go get the good answer because a correct answer exists.

The fact that any answers are made public at all is useful to us all. That’s free knowledge. Would it have been better if OpenAI had discovered this very achievable fact and not said anything? Surely the papers, post discovery would have spoken of the “hoarding” of such “essential human knowledge”.

Overall, I find the thing unconvincing wholly.

Ygg2 9 minutes ago | parent

> That’s what technology does. And he might be upset but we’re the ones paying for it and frankly, I’m happier to have more questions answered than for fewer answered but in an artisanal fashion.

Would you prefer if graph theory didn't exist but we could answer if you can pass all bridges in Königsberg, without going through same bridge twice.

Or if we could answer any question without knowing why? What about answering Hilbert without theory of Godel's Incompletness theorem? Or knowing Nth digit of Pi without calculus.

Because that's essentially what you're asking for. If you gave humans a Djinn that could answer perfectly any question, it would kill most of our endeavors. Because it's not a problem that was unsolved for years "It's just the thing Djinn already answered so why bother?" Even if one is extremely curious, others would not see value in that curiosity.

__MatrixMan__ 5 minutes ago | parent

> I’m happier to have more questions answered than for fewer answered but in an artisanal fashion.

But the value in seeking mathematical answers was never in the answers themselves. It was in the things one discovers along the way. The artisanal fashion was the whole point.

These AI proofs only serve as an I-told-you-so. They're not creating surrounding theory which can later turn out to have useful application.

fooker 13 minutes ago | parent

I find this entirely self serving.

Terrence Tao was very supportive of AI and formalizing math with lean when it looked like it was giving ‘generalists’ like him an edge over mathematicians too deep into one particular niche field.

But now that it’s letting everyone, including mathematicians who are perhaps too specialized, explore ideas and patterns from related math fields, he’s suddenly ‘on a war footing’.

xeonmc 5 minutes ago | parent

I think it's a bit of an unfair characterization, see this post for the nuances in how the math community approached the development:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50128468

magus-stoopr 11 minutes ago | parent

the live video interview on numberphile comes without the New York Times' narrative filter