My recent take on AI is that people haven't adapted to the new huge potential of the tool, and don't dream big enough (yet).
It's like seeing a car engine for the first time, lamenting about the future of horses, and not realizing it'll also help us fly.
There might be a “proof motive” in math which one could argue will drive the full automation of theorem proving. But we must recognize that profit is more universally valuable (i.e. it has value outside the industry in which it was created), whereas proofs are only valuable inside the math community (at least the pure math proofs the labs have been publishing thus far).
Do rich people like opera? Yes. Is that a profit motive? No... but it's a shibboleth for wanting to be rich. Do you get it?
It's ridiculous to say, no profit motive in mathematics. It's like saying, no profit motive in LISP. But cmon, you think the Collison brother who took Math 55 and liked LISP: I know that in a pedantic sense what you mean. But in terms of academic departments where people say they are no interested in money and it turns out they want to become billionaires... Math Department ranks pretty highly. Always has.
People have been dreaming running PS5 games on PC for a long time. Just when AI starting to become capable of doing that, Anthropic shut it down.
Yeah you can dream, but only what we allow.
2. Even if someone wants to do something that’s in a legal grey area, or more (hacking others, another item limited by Anthropic), is the idea that such people won’t have the ability to use AI to do those things? I don’t understand the criticism that just because one company might institute some guard rails that those who want to conduct legally grey or black activities will be unable to use other AIs to do so?
There’s an immediate resistance towards change rather than embracing it and finding opportunities to improve and work with it.
Maybe some math departments could pay OpenAI for access to their models, but I doubt OpenAI would want to deal with most of them.
Maybe we should listen to people that care about negative externalities more often, and actually mitigate them.
What? Only websites that want to track you before opting in have cookie banners. HN doesn't have a cookie banner, in case you haven't noticed. I'd say your issue isn't with consumer protection, but with pushy marketing people (or worse). But they're good at marketing, hence the cookie banner nonsense complaints, which redirect the anger towards laws requiring that creeps announce their presence, rather than the creeps themselves.
You can drive 1000 miles and arrive at the destination on the highway quickly.
Or you can take the slow road and walk. You discover unrelated things, make new relationships, see the scenery, listen and smell what is around you and have time to contemplate things which may or not be related.
This particular tool economy robs us of all these things in the rush to the destination.
I'd sacrifice "progress" a little for some of the better bits of humanity.
I get your point in general, but I think vehicles are a poor analogy because in many ways they have changed the places we live for the worse (and yes I’ll concede occasionally for the better). It turns out we need places to park all of these vehicles and they compete for space with humans.
That analogy holds too.
They neglect to build sidewalks, and force you to walk 1-2 meters from cars racing at 70 km/h. With all the noise and high risk stressing you up to the level you just wanna scream.
stevenhuang: No one forces you to drive. You can still walk.
Or has he changed his mind again.
Singularity? Probably not.
Tech bro dictatorship? Unfortunately a bit more likely.
None of the above? Then we have a small shot at a great future.
Having a machine that solves hard problems must be a good thing.