Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized:
No, I’m not aware of any direct practical implications of any of these results. I certainly don’t expect the O(n log0.9999999999999 n)-time Fourier Transform algorithm to get practically deployed anytime soon! But anyone who harps on this, simply doesn’t understand what mathematical progress looks like, or how it eventually pulls the rest of science and technology and human civilization with it. If and when the relevant human mathematicians understood the clever new ideas in all 372 of these papers, I have no doubt that they’d be able to use the ideas to do all sorts of new things, and that some of those things would have practical value. That’s yet another reason to try to keep human understanding at the center of our enterprise—unless, of course, you’re happy to outsource the task of understanding and applying the ideas to AI models as well.
Meanwhile, something calling itself the Association for Human Mathematics put out a statement condemning OpenAI for its release. The statement included a sentence that’s since been widely mocked on social media: “Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done.” (Imagine G. H. Hardy saying to Ramanujan, “who asked you to prove all these bizarre new identities?”)
If it wasn’t clear, the members of AHM speak for themselves, not for the math community as a whole.
More here.
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