I think a lot about how Terrence Tao and the usual 30 (already well-funded) math guys will receive this cash while us early-career math students are left holding the bag.
It's akin somewhat to "donating 100 dollars to the node JS foundation, not the packages that appear when you run npm fund".
> The foundation will manage and award the funding, including through an open call for proposals, to support workshops and initiatives that help researchers evaluate recent AI-assisted results, learn and use new tools, share perspectives and shape collective standards for AI use.
A non-zero amount of it is probably going directly to the AI companies through tokens...
Why? I thought we already established* that most professional mathematicians are not necessary (in the near future, then maybe "any"), so why would they doom these students with pity grants to basically create unnecessary jobs for them? More practically, wouldn't that money be best served (i.e., raw ROI) by purchasing more tokens on the frontier models?
(*) The existence of this effort itself is a good heuristic.
I'm curious what you as an early-career math student would want the Simon Foundation to do differently from what it says it will do. I hope there is a way for students like to you to get a slice of the pie.
Isn't that basically all of AI for white collar workers?
I haven't escape note that I can do tons of things with AI because I spent the last 10 years building a bunch of side projects and now I can complete those side projects because I know all the magic words.
Gonna need to unionize because the gerontology is just getting stronger.
>I think a lot about how Terrence Tao and the usual 30 (already well-funded) math guys will receive this cash while us early-career math students are left holding the bag.
Never understood this sentiment. Theses top researchers could do almost anything else with their skills outside Academia and make far far more money. You don't get rich off grants... They could all presumably walk into Anthropic or OpenAI for near $1M a year in TC.
If you yourself are as cracked as you think you could also do the same...
Getting your foot in the door is always the first step. Sure, you can be as cracked as you want. You can be mediocre as well. None of that matters if you don't have a foundation to start from.
That's like saying "if you want to work as a chef, DoorDash delivery offers the ability to order lots of meals". The new jobs are both fewer and shittier.
I hope the future you built for others is imposed on you too.
As much as this looks like a math problem, it's actually an everyone problem. Some hands-on (literally) have more way to go, but otherwise this is a "hop" that the entire society needs to cross. Honestly, I don't think there's going to be be any Math 2.0 as there won't be any other 2.0, at least not in any utilitarian way and the effort to find utility where there's none is misguided at best. The analogy I like to make is that with horses trying to find utility y in the Ford era.
It's also not an OpenAI, Anthropic or any specific name caused problem. This type of progress has always been happening, it's more or less coincidental (like Stigler's law). The problem though is we need to rethink how we operate as a society and too few (IMO) are trying to make this conversation happen.
You cannot use mathematics without understanding it.
It doesn't help you that AI understands it, when you don't. You are the one getting screwed over by others who understand statistics better than you do.
When you're rich enough, you can pay others (or AI) to protect you. But then you're dependent upon them.
So, under a transactional model of social relationships, you are in an arms race over raw intelligence and competency/data. With only one winner, who takes all in the end.
Logically, most people have already lost in that game, so why keep playing that nonsense?
That also means that you will need buy-in from a plurality/majority of that society to make that "hop". This is not going to break politically this election cycle, but it will show up. Barring a 2008 level event, it will likely be the issue with the greatest growth heading into 2028, and that will place the impetus on the "specific name"s to communicate how this isn't just trickle down benefits. Especially when it will be an easy sell to people that the "hop" means real people falling into the gap or getting left behind. They need to figure out a way to make the distribution of benefits more immediate and tangible to everyday folks, because the perception of the distributed costs is a very easy sell in this political environment, regardless of the reality. I can't imagine that getting better over the next two years.
too few are talking about reshaping society because those in power are not letting that happen. the amount of wealth concentrated at the top is staggering and allows them to fortify their position by bribing, buying governments and media.
No, it's not an "everyone" problem yet. Each field is likely on its own timeline. Knowing how well AI is at proving theorems is of only limited use for predicting what will happen and when in other fields.
I love how "society" is investing billions to develop a tech that makes its own citizens obsolete, but doesn't manage to provide basic healthcare, housing or infrastructure...
Maybe you get conditioned on how the rich usually treats other people, but this view isn't well supported by healthy discussions among the math community wrt recent AI 'disruption'
We're not so far from 'you never had some god given right to be alive, well fed and sheltered. You have a good body, make yourself useful in some industry.'
> Under a partnership, the Simons Foundation, Anthropic and OpenAI will commit $15 million in combined funding and resources. The foundation will manage and award the funding, including through an open call for proposals, to support workshops and initiatives that help researchers evaluate recent AI-assisted results, learn and use new tools, share perspectives and shape collective standards for AI use.
The foundation was started in 1994, Wikipedia says "one of the largest charitable organizations in the United States with assets of over $5 billion in 2022" - Jim Simons founded the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund.
Simons Foundation also significantly funds arXiv, and also a large number of specific grants across maths and sciences. I don't think there's much agenda here.
The foundation was an early backer of machine learning for science, including funding the development of the Lean proof assistant, which has revolutionized how mathematicians work and made AI-assisted proofs possible. Additionally, the foundation has convened workshops, lectures and collaborations that have brought mathematicians together to explore and discuss AI’s role in the field.
So charitable that it launches this initiative with ClosedAI and Misanthropic. There are probably accelerationist and transhumanist nutcases at this foundation.
So, basically they created the recent situation in math where a great deals of top mathematicians criticized their methods, even called to boycott their dumped results. And the answer of the AI labs is buying these poor academic souls with 15$ millions? Most of them even as AI tokens? Why do I see a macabre irony here?!
Can you ever look behind the surface of ... anything at all? Only naive and childlike statements in favor of AI proponents. It is literally like saying: "Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson are esteemed members of the magnanimous and generous Royal Family."
This IS me going beyond the surface. The obvious question here is "who is this foundation and are they working with the AI labs". I answered both.
The headline in this piece made it look like maybe a foundation was trying to help mathematician's push back against the unwanted assault on their profession by the AI labs. The section I quoted shows that's not the case.
Also not sure how you interpreted "foundation started by the Renaissance Technology hedge fund billionaire" as a mindless boost.
> > Under a partnership, the Simons Foundation, Anthropic and OpenAI will commit $15 million in combined funding and resources.
OAI and Ant got blowback for essentially strip mining mathematical discoveries into PR wins for their models, accidentally laying waste to the research field in process. Throwing ~$5M each into PR whitewashing (partially in token credits), seems self-serving.
Kudos to the Simons Foundation for seizing the moment to offer the labs a fig leaf of respectability. Might have been the fastest "Yes" on a grant proposal ever.
Ironically, that has been that way for most people since forever.
Comparing with the situation in programming, where code evaluation (obviously analogous to "understanding") is that bottleneck now, should get people the idea of being in the same boat.
Did you read any of the explanations from mathematicians over the last month? What part of them do you disagree with?
For example [1]:
> In many fields and activities, years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas. However, building on a vast body of previous human work, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of producing the results of such work directly, and these goals cease to align.
Or [2]:
> Use of AI tools, when done responsibly, can support not just the initial generation of a solution, but all of the valuable followup activities that traditionally flow out of that solution. But at the current time, the opposite is often occurring: problems are being solved autonomously by AI prompters who have no interest in the broader field itself once their initial target is "solved", and do not understand the AI output well enough to answer questions on the result, give talks, or otherwise interact with the rest of the field.
> ...
> solutions to open problems are now being harvested at large scale in an unsustainable fashion, leaving entire fields of mathematics much less fertile than when such problems were solved in the traditional "Math 1.0" fashion.
OpenAI's market cap or valuation estimate went up by about 230 billion dollars within a few weeks after announcing that they solved NS. It can't be known how much of that value change was because of that announcement, but must be at least a good chunk of it.
I’m in the funding markets around this stuff. Nobody took this into account. It’s more for PR with government and potential hires (and maybe some corporate marketing).
>... essentially strip mining mathematical discoveries into PR wins for their models, accidentally laying waste to the research field in process.
Jeeze, that's an almost impressively charged way of saying "private company performing SOTA research on open problems that anyone has been welcomed to approach for over a century" lol
I think it does a disservice to the dialogue to strip away any nuance here and just paint these companies as evil for doing what everyone has been anticipating companies like them doing well before LLMs even existed. It's clearly just trying to fit these events into a specific narrative which does nothing to actually address the inevitability of everything that comes next. Feel free to pressure OpenAI and Anthropic to stop performing math research so that it can just be picked up by whoever catches up and doesn't care about bad PR. I'm sure Musk with Grok will be extra considerate of pure math researchers when he sees an opening to pick up those scraps lol
So they want mathematicians to keep prompting and giving feedback to the models for clarifications on their proofs. Then write it all up and publish it in a journal and mention their AI usage. Then suddenly the models end up producing readable and understandable proofs through the "emergence" of the skills because of the scaling laws.
Highly doubt it. Remember how cursor would never save or train or customer’s sessions and then got acquired by SpaceX because of their large coding training dataset ?
I really can't empathize with treating mathematicians as some sort of AI refugees who need coddling and support. AI is a tool, and competent mathematicians should learn to use it like everyone else. I find it hard to believe that AI doesn't represent a net potential benefit to human understanding of mathematics. Yes it can be misused, but any tool can be misused. Just don't misuse it...
> can't empathize with treating mathematicians as some sort of AI refugees
They may be a vanguard.
> find it hard to believe that AI doesn't represent a net potential benefit to human understanding of mathematics. Yes it can be misused
Have you read Tao’s criticism of AI in mathematics? The concern isn’t mis-use, it’s ecosystem collapse.
A good analogy would be offshoring. If AI causes higher mathematical thought among humans to stop happening for a generation, we could wind up in a state where the field stops progressing because AI is unable to generate new interesting questions or cross-link findings into practical applications.
More directly, the risk is that happens in America but not in a more-thoughtful country.
But it's entirely up to humans whether or not higher mathematical thought ceases due to lazy over reliance on AI.
Just because AI is capable of churning out vomit inducing prose, doesn't mean we need to surrender to a future filled with it. Humans who actually care about what they're doing will use AI when and where it should be used. I trust the intelligence, curiosity and tenacity of mathematicians to learn to work with AI. I don't understand the sky is falling worst case scenario Tao and others seem to be taking as the most likely future.
This reprioritization of math would release a tremendous amount of human capital to do other more productive things other than posing yet another abstract puzzle which may or may not have an use in a few hundred years. It's not even clear if the human race can survive until then nor is it justified to spend that resource researching that far ahead instead of just when we need it.
To merely wish for others not to misuse a powerful tool is a bit naive?
You have to actively design society to accommodate for the dangers it poses.
Of course everybody should "learn to use AI", but the real questions here are wildly different: can everybody use AI? Do the big US companies succeed in capturing the system, effectively shutting out every competitor and how do you imagine to benefit from that? Etc.
one issue is that the tool is wielded both by the user and the provider - each time we augment our skill with its capability, we are improving its capability with our skills.
knowledge workers are building their own gallows and it probably can't be stopped.
yeah its egotistic bs because they built an identity about being attributed in a journal instead of just focusing on the advancement. they collectively rationalize it by saying that the answers aren’t as important, the path to the answers are, despite the answers being what everyone considered them to be using taxpayer and other funding for, and the distributed time used.
they’ve only had a few weeks to deprogram so I’ll let it shake out just a little longer
Uhm...I fear you may have made the mistake of just reading the comments here rather than the article. Normally that works out OK but this thread has attracted the highest density of terrible comments I've ever seen on an HN thread.
The point of the initiative in the article is to help do the things you say mathematicians should be doing. Mathematicians recognize AI has reached the point that it can make significant advances, and are now trying to figure out how to most effectively use it.
Nearly everyone rejected the idea of a CERN-like project for mathematics when it was recently proposed. It should have been more seriously considered.
Now that things are settling a bit after the Navier-Stokes and theorem-dump shocks, something like what mathematics will look like post-AI is starting to emerge. Of course, things should be conditioned on the assumption that capabilities will continue to improve, but imagine something like this--
An institute with a tremendous amount of compute, either rented or owned, built on the Humboldtian model of the unity of teaching and research. The main draw for big names would be the access to compute, free of the fear of being scooped. New forms of attribution and collaboration would develop, and we'd gain some clarity for students and PhDs on what a future career looks like.
The current melange of math university departments all following their own paths through the crisis without consolidating resources makes the transition more difficult. Think of the path physics took beginning with scattered cyclotrons (the basement of the Niels Bohr institute was even dug out to put one in), then the larger labs that followed. That transition was gradual because physics led it from within, whereas with mathematics every university department is suddenly at a massive compute disadvantage with respect to labs that aren't following the same model, and are driven by different incentives.
It could be this simple--maybe we don't need to completely throw away the old model, attribution practices, and so on, and maybe we can preserve the transfer of knowledge to the next generation of mathematicians, if we simply give them lots of compute.
An analogy to physics to highlight how the divergent interests of the labs could be managed in a state of "peaceful coexistence" might be: physicists got well-funded accelerators and labs that followed standard academic practices. These were separate from "war work" (Los Alamos) that followed government priorities, even with the crossover of personnel. You could have the same thing with a "math accelerator" working on the academic model, while the AI labs follow their own priorities, and some subset of people cross between.
It might be objected that this is merely a conservative attempt to preserve the existing academic conventions and practices currently under threat, but tenure itself already does that, and is arguably the very thing that exacerbates the problem for young mathematicians.
In chats with models like deepseek the LLM makes many basic math wrong claims. Maybe more advanced models can in special circumstances, guided by the work of humans and Lean, prove theorems. But just like in RL, the brute force approach of failing a million times may not be enough when the reward is far.
In math the reward is finding the decomposition that reduces the problem to simpler cases, and in many cases that reward is very far. Furthermore, the LLM may process the many cases fast, but the decomposition often comes from a human, and the model takes the credit for the proof.
This foundation could provide the LLMs with the decompositions, generated by human ingenuity, that they need. But once supplied, the model can run the cases and get the credit. Hence more credits for LLMs and fewer jobs and worse prospects for humans, even if it isn't an intended consequence.
Because it's not for the benefits of those receiving the funding. It's money to pay people willing to improve how AI does math so AI companies can be even more effective and rendering human endeavors unprofitable. Math is a hot target right now and they're going after it.
It's completely selfish and won't help anyone except those at the top.
These days I use AI for development and it feels like my coding skills are getting worse, so I sometimes need rehab, and I'm a bit worried that mathematicians will go through the same thing. Later, since the proof structure is built by AI, I think there will be cases where mathematicians themselves can't touch it (because if they do, they can't tell where and how it will break).
Is mathematics deprived of the associated knowledge that comes from a human first deriving a proof, how exploring the problem domain including the dead-ends has changed the mathematician's thinking, when a proof is given by AI? It seems that the solving rather than just the solution gave much to mathematics.
Can you explain to me what "navigation" means if AI actually succeeds at automating mathematics? Or is the bet here that the AI companies will fail to deliver?
In some way, yes. The whole situation seems completely grounded in that mathematicians are greedy for status and clout trying to write their name on new discoveries in blood and publish as many papers as possible. And now they are sad because they lost their way to this status.
When you remove this greed and status seeking you might actually end up with a healthy environment.
Truth about the Simons Foundation (it was an early AI booster) is flagged here. Jim Simons gets a hagiography by a couple of shills. A group of utterly vile people frequents this site.
Genuinely the least they could do for what a pox they are on so many industries, on consumers of electronics, on local municipalities, on the environment...
And herein lies the rub: As others have pointed out in another active thread on AI in mathematics: The crisis could be described as one of career, status, and funding vs the general concept of the field. We have now circled back to question of who deserves these tokens!
I belive that the world would be in a much better place if all science was ultimately funded by a global organization such as UN and patents did not exist. If you are a research group that successfully creates something worth replicating then you should be eligable to receive a grant as well as request grants for projects that cost billions of dollars.
There is some success with this kind of strategy already when it comes to space, LHS and ITER come to mind. NASA is somewhat operating on this very same principle although it is a government organization to begin with.
Although the opposite reaction is that you should keep people behind inventions poor to encourage them to create more inventions which ultimately what ends up happening in the real world more often than not. The people who revolutioned the world did get fame and glory, including numerous monetary compensation packages - but compared to the people who sold those inventions they only got a tiny fraction of a fraction, this is especially clear with people who are normal employees and inventions are credited to a company rather than the few people who made it possible.
May be instead of funding military or other countries, they can fund scientist.. And all the tax funded must be in public domain instead of giving it to private companies.
Aside from the fact that $15M is couch change for these companies, and aside from the fact that this project is hypocritical and self-serving (as explained by many other posts), the whole idea of naming a supposedly large sum of money in a headline in order to impress is just silly. Whether a project is successful or worthwhile has little to do with how much funding may be lined up, and throwing numbers around is often just a smokescreen for poor planning and execution.
how is that different than what's been happening forever? Mathematics has ALWAYS been a "charity". The only thing that changes over time is who gives the money, first it's the church, then it's princes, then government, it's been corporations for a while, this is nothing new.
Except that even the Cosa Nostra is less anti-human than the current tech bros and their foundation fronts.
You really cannot see any difference between the government and corporations supporting something? This "things have always been that way" talking point is getting out of hand.
Wonder if they realize these types of things help grow massive resentment against such companies? I'm astounded by how terrible the politics of SV actually is.
I think a lot about how Terrence Tao and the usual 30 (already well-funded) math guys will receive this cash while us early-career math students are left holding the bag.
It's akin somewhat to "donating 100 dollars to the node JS foundation, not the packages that appear when you run npm fund".
But it's not like those guys will just pocket that money. They will use it like all academic grant money is used: to hire PhD students and postdocs.
> The foundation will manage and award the funding, including through an open call for proposals, to support workshops and initiatives that help researchers evaluate recent AI-assisted results, learn and use new tools, share perspectives and shape collective standards for AI use.
A non-zero amount of it is probably going directly to the AI companies through tokens...
> to hire PhD students and postdocs
Why? I thought we already established* that most professional mathematicians are not necessary (in the near future, then maybe "any"), so why would they doom these students with pity grants to basically create unnecessary jobs for them? More practically, wouldn't that money be best served (i.e., raw ROI) by purchasing more tokens on the frontier models?
(*) The existence of this effort itself is a good heuristic.
The joys of trickle-down economy...
This is legit akin to "trickle down" which never works because people are selfish.
And blog in favor of AI ...
in the age of AI? are you _....sure_
Ha ha ha
I'm curious what you as an early-career math student would want the Simon Foundation to do differently from what it says it will do. I hope there is a way for students like to you to get a slice of the pie.
Not promote AI for one. If there's money to do something, someone will take the money to do it, which will in turn erode the discipline.
Isn't that basically all of AI for white collar workers?
I haven't escape note that I can do tons of things with AI because I spent the last 10 years building a bunch of side projects and now I can complete those side projects because I know all the magic words.
Gonna need to unionize because the gerontology is just getting stronger.
>I think a lot about how Terrence Tao and the usual 30 (already well-funded) math guys will receive this cash while us early-career math students are left holding the bag.
Never understood this sentiment. Theses top researchers could do almost anything else with their skills outside Academia and make far far more money. You don't get rich off grants... They could all presumably walk into Anthropic or OpenAI for near $1M a year in TC.
If you yourself are as cracked as you think you could also do the same...
Getting your foot in the door is always the first step. Sure, you can be as cracked as you want. You can be mediocre as well. None of that matters if you don't have a foundation to start from.
Why are you "holding the bag" You're early career math students. I know a lot of industries that would love to hire you.
Even if you want to work in research, AI offers a lot of opportunities to do even more research, and less grunt work
That's like saying "if you want to work as a chef, DoorDash delivery offers the ability to order lots of meals". The new jobs are both fewer and shittier.
I hope the future you built for others is imposed on you too.
Hey do you have any good sources for that? Would like to read more
As much as this looks like a math problem, it's actually an everyone problem. Some hands-on (literally) have more way to go, but otherwise this is a "hop" that the entire society needs to cross. Honestly, I don't think there's going to be be any Math 2.0 as there won't be any other 2.0, at least not in any utilitarian way and the effort to find utility where there's none is misguided at best. The analogy I like to make is that with horses trying to find utility y in the Ford era.
It's also not an OpenAI, Anthropic or any specific name caused problem. This type of progress has always been happening, it's more or less coincidental (like Stigler's law). The problem though is we need to rethink how we operate as a society and too few (IMO) are trying to make this conversation happen.
You cannot use mathematics without understanding it.
It doesn't help you that AI understands it, when you don't. You are the one getting screwed over by others who understand statistics better than you do.
When you're rich enough, you can pay others (or AI) to protect you. But then you're dependent upon them.
So, under a transactional model of social relationships, you are in an arms race over raw intelligence and competency/data. With only one winner, who takes all in the end.
Logically, most people have already lost in that game, so why keep playing that nonsense?
That also means that you will need buy-in from a plurality/majority of that society to make that "hop". This is not going to break politically this election cycle, but it will show up. Barring a 2008 level event, it will likely be the issue with the greatest growth heading into 2028, and that will place the impetus on the "specific name"s to communicate how this isn't just trickle down benefits. Especially when it will be an easy sell to people that the "hop" means real people falling into the gap or getting left behind. They need to figure out a way to make the distribution of benefits more immediate and tangible to everyday folks, because the perception of the distributed costs is a very easy sell in this political environment, regardless of the reality. I can't imagine that getting better over the next two years.
too few are talking about reshaping society because those in power are not letting that happen. the amount of wealth concentrated at the top is staggering and allows them to fortify their position by bribing, buying governments and media.
No, it's not an "everyone" problem yet. Each field is likely on its own timeline. Knowing how well AI is at proving theorems is of only limited use for predicting what will happen and when in other fields.
I love how "society" is investing billions to develop a tech that makes its own citizens obsolete, but doesn't manage to provide basic healthcare, housing or infrastructure...
Maybe you get conditioned on how the rich usually treats other people, but this view isn't well supported by healthy discussions among the math community wrt recent AI 'disruption'
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Higher ed as we know it started out as rich families paying churches to let their kids study theology to avoid manual labor.
Various historians agree with the idea credentialism is largely just a tool of aristocracy to manipulate the public.
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You never had some god given right to be a math researcher. You have a big brain and training in a field that is very useful in various industries.
We're not so far from 'you never had some god given right to be alive, well fed and sheltered. You have a good body, make yourself useful in some industry.'
Ha, reminds me of how anthropic publishes their math papers with meat proxy math professors who were compensated for their "authorship" of the paper.
Essentially gifts for the annointed.
> Under a partnership, the Simons Foundation, Anthropic and OpenAI will commit $15 million in combined funding and resources. The foundation will manage and award the funding, including through an open call for proposals, to support workshops and initiatives that help researchers evaluate recent AI-assisted results, learn and use new tools, share perspectives and shape collective standards for AI use.
The foundation was started in 1994, Wikipedia says "one of the largest charitable organizations in the United States with assets of over $5 billion in 2022" - Jim Simons founded the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund.
Simons Foundation also significantly funds arXiv, and also a large number of specific grants across maths and sciences. I don't think there's much agenda here.
It is right in TFA:
The foundation was an early backer of machine learning for science, including funding the development of the Lean proof assistant, which has revolutionized how mathematicians work and made AI-assisted proofs possible. Additionally, the foundation has convened workshops, lectures and collaborations that have brought mathematicians together to explore and discuss AI’s role in the field.
arXiv, where BigAI trains from.
They also gifted $ 5m [1] to the FRO (Lean Focused Research Organization) [2].
[1] https://www.simonsfoundation.org/news/from-trust-to-verifica...
[2] https://lean-lang.org/fro/
I see you saying a lot of intelligent things - do you really not know much about the Simons Foundation?
I did not. I certainly didn't know they were one of the USA's largest charitable foundations!
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So charitable that it launches this initiative with ClosedAI and Misanthropic. There are probably accelerationist and transhumanist nutcases at this foundation.
Quanta magazine is the propaganda arm.
Propaganda of what?
So, basically they created the recent situation in math where a great deals of top mathematicians criticized their methods, even called to boycott their dumped results. And the answer of the AI labs is buying these poor academic souls with 15$ millions? Most of them even as AI tokens? Why do I see a macabre irony here?!
Can you ever look behind the surface of ... anything at all? Only naive and childlike statements in favor of AI proponents. It is literally like saying: "Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson are esteemed members of the magnanimous and generous Royal Family."
This IS me going beyond the surface. The obvious question here is "who is this foundation and are they working with the AI labs". I answered both.
The headline in this piece made it look like maybe a foundation was trying to help mathematician's push back against the unwanted assault on their profession by the AI labs. The section I quoted shows that's not the case.
Also not sure how you interpreted "foundation started by the Renaissance Technology hedge fund billionaire" as a mindless boost.
> > Under a partnership, the Simons Foundation, Anthropic and OpenAI will commit $15 million in combined funding and resources.
OAI and Ant got blowback for essentially strip mining mathematical discoveries into PR wins for their models, accidentally laying waste to the research field in process. Throwing ~$5M each into PR whitewashing (partially in token credits), seems self-serving.
Kudos to the Simons Foundation for seizing the moment to offer the labs a fig leaf of respectability. Might have been the fastest "Yes" on a grant proposal ever.
The research field of mathematics is obviously so different with these frontier models that to describe it has being laid waste is nonsensical.
It’s like saying the power loom laid waste to the field of textiles.
The bottleneck now is human understanding.
Ironically, that has been that way for most people since forever.
Comparing with the situation in programming, where code evaluation (obviously analogous to "understanding") is that bottleneck now, should get people the idea of being in the same boat.
Did you read any of the explanations from mathematicians over the last month? What part of them do you disagree with?
For example [1]:
> In many fields and activities, years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas. However, building on a vast body of previous human work, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of producing the results of such work directly, and these goals cease to align.
Or [2]:
> Use of AI tools, when done responsibly, can support not just the initial generation of a solution, but all of the valuable followup activities that traditionally flow out of that solution. But at the current time, the opposite is often occurring: problems are being solved autonomously by AI prompters who have no interest in the broader field itself once their initial target is "solved", and do not understand the AI output well enough to answer questions on the result, give talks, or otherwise interact with the rest of the field.
> ...
> solutions to open problems are now being harvested at large scale in an unsustainable fashion, leaving entire fields of mathematics much less fertile than when such problems were solved in the traditional "Math 1.0" fashion.
[1]: https://mathandai.org/
[2]: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117395268130901862
OpenAI's market cap or valuation estimate went up by about 230 billion dollars within a few weeks after announcing that they solved NS. It can't be known how much of that value change was because of that announcement, but must be at least a good chunk of it.
> must be at least a good chunk of it
I’m in the funding markets around this stuff. Nobody took this into account. It’s more for PR with government and potential hires (and maybe some corporate marketing).
>... essentially strip mining mathematical discoveries into PR wins for their models, accidentally laying waste to the research field in process.
Jeeze, that's an almost impressively charged way of saying "private company performing SOTA research on open problems that anyone has been welcomed to approach for over a century" lol
I think it does a disservice to the dialogue to strip away any nuance here and just paint these companies as evil for doing what everyone has been anticipating companies like them doing well before LLMs even existed. It's clearly just trying to fit these events into a specific narrative which does nothing to actually address the inevitability of everything that comes next. Feel free to pressure OpenAI and Anthropic to stop performing math research so that it can just be picked up by whoever catches up and doesn't care about bad PR. I'm sure Musk with Grok will be extra considerate of pure math researchers when he sees an opening to pick up those scraps lol
So they want mathematicians to keep prompting and giving feedback to the models for clarifications on their proofs. Then write it all up and publish it in a journal and mention their AI usage. Then suddenly the models end up producing readable and understandable proofs through the "emergence" of the skills because of the scaling laws.
That's exactly why they want you to use AI as well.
My effort to help scientists navigate the AI era:
On ChatGPT: Settings -> Data controls -> Turn off “Improve model for everyone”
On Claude: Settings -> Privacy -> Turn off “Help improve our AI models”
They can scrape your work after you publish it.
Will they even abide by these settings? They did not respect IP...
Highly doubt it. Remember how cursor would never save or train or customer’s sessions and then got acquired by SpaceX because of their large coding training dataset ?
I really can't empathize with treating mathematicians as some sort of AI refugees who need coddling and support. AI is a tool, and competent mathematicians should learn to use it like everyone else. I find it hard to believe that AI doesn't represent a net potential benefit to human understanding of mathematics. Yes it can be misused, but any tool can be misused. Just don't misuse it...
> can't empathize with treating mathematicians as some sort of AI refugees
They may be a vanguard.
> find it hard to believe that AI doesn't represent a net potential benefit to human understanding of mathematics. Yes it can be misused
Have you read Tao’s criticism of AI in mathematics? The concern isn’t mis-use, it’s ecosystem collapse.
A good analogy would be offshoring. If AI causes higher mathematical thought among humans to stop happening for a generation, we could wind up in a state where the field stops progressing because AI is unable to generate new interesting questions or cross-link findings into practical applications.
More directly, the risk is that happens in America but not in a more-thoughtful country.
But it's entirely up to humans whether or not higher mathematical thought ceases due to lazy over reliance on AI.
Just because AI is capable of churning out vomit inducing prose, doesn't mean we need to surrender to a future filled with it. Humans who actually care about what they're doing will use AI when and where it should be used. I trust the intelligence, curiosity and tenacity of mathematicians to learn to work with AI. I don't understand the sky is falling worst case scenario Tao and others seem to be taking as the most likely future.
This reprioritization of math would release a tremendous amount of human capital to do other more productive things other than posing yet another abstract puzzle which may or may not have an use in a few hundred years. It's not even clear if the human race can survive until then nor is it justified to spend that resource researching that far ahead instead of just when we need it.
Wouldn't that be developers?
To merely wish for others not to misuse a powerful tool is a bit naive?
You have to actively design society to accommodate for the dangers it poses.
Of course everybody should "learn to use AI", but the real questions here are wildly different: can everybody use AI? Do the big US companies succeed in capturing the system, effectively shutting out every competitor and how do you imagine to benefit from that? Etc.
one issue is that the tool is wielded both by the user and the provider - each time we augment our skill with its capability, we are improving its capability with our skills.
knowledge workers are building their own gallows and it probably can't be stopped.
yeah its egotistic bs because they built an identity about being attributed in a journal instead of just focusing on the advancement. they collectively rationalize it by saying that the answers aren’t as important, the path to the answers are, despite the answers being what everyone considered them to be using taxpayer and other funding for, and the distributed time used.
they’ve only had a few weeks to deprogram so I’ll let it shake out just a little longer
Uhm...I fear you may have made the mistake of just reading the comments here rather than the article. Normally that works out OK but this thread has attracted the highest density of terrible comments I've ever seen on an HN thread.
The point of the initiative in the article is to help do the things you say mathematicians should be doing. Mathematicians recognize AI has reached the point that it can make significant advances, and are now trying to figure out how to most effectively use it.
This isn't coddling — it's bribing key people to use AI and blog about it.
Nearly everyone rejected the idea of a CERN-like project for mathematics when it was recently proposed. It should have been more seriously considered.
Now that things are settling a bit after the Navier-Stokes and theorem-dump shocks, something like what mathematics will look like post-AI is starting to emerge. Of course, things should be conditioned on the assumption that capabilities will continue to improve, but imagine something like this--
An institute with a tremendous amount of compute, either rented or owned, built on the Humboldtian model of the unity of teaching and research. The main draw for big names would be the access to compute, free of the fear of being scooped. New forms of attribution and collaboration would develop, and we'd gain some clarity for students and PhDs on what a future career looks like.
The current melange of math university departments all following their own paths through the crisis without consolidating resources makes the transition more difficult. Think of the path physics took beginning with scattered cyclotrons (the basement of the Niels Bohr institute was even dug out to put one in), then the larger labs that followed. That transition was gradual because physics led it from within, whereas with mathematics every university department is suddenly at a massive compute disadvantage with respect to labs that aren't following the same model, and are driven by different incentives.
It could be this simple--maybe we don't need to completely throw away the old model, attribution practices, and so on, and maybe we can preserve the transfer of knowledge to the next generation of mathematicians, if we simply give them lots of compute.
An analogy to physics to highlight how the divergent interests of the labs could be managed in a state of "peaceful coexistence" might be: physicists got well-funded accelerators and labs that followed standard academic practices. These were separate from "war work" (Los Alamos) that followed government priorities, even with the crossover of personnel. You could have the same thing with a "math accelerator" working on the academic model, while the AI labs follow their own priorities, and some subset of people cross between.
It might be objected that this is merely a conservative attempt to preserve the existing academic conventions and practices currently under threat, but tenure itself already does that, and is arguably the very thing that exacerbates the problem for young mathematicians.
In chats with models like deepseek the LLM makes many basic math wrong claims. Maybe more advanced models can in special circumstances, guided by the work of humans and Lean, prove theorems. But just like in RL, the brute force approach of failing a million times may not be enough when the reward is far.
In math the reward is finding the decomposition that reduces the problem to simpler cases, and in many cases that reward is very far. Furthermore, the LLM may process the many cases fast, but the decomposition often comes from a human, and the model takes the credit for the proof.
This foundation could provide the LLMs with the decompositions, generated by human ingenuity, that they need. But once supplied, the model can run the cases and get the credit. Hence more credits for LLMs and fewer jobs and worse prospects for humans, even if it isn't an intended consequence.
This is the first time I hear of a group receiving founding to navigate AI era. Why this one and not all the others that have to adapt to the AI era?
(Yes I know it's not the group directly receiving the founding)
It’s simple: Because Jim Simons (who founded RenTech and Simons Foundation) was a prominent mathematician himself.
He was also a major backer of autism research, because his family member had it. People spend money to where their passion is.
Because it's not for the benefits of those receiving the funding. It's money to pay people willing to improve how AI does math so AI companies can be even more effective and rendering human endeavors unprofitable. Math is a hot target right now and they're going after it.
It's completely selfish and won't help anyone except those at the top.
> Why this one and not all the others that have to adapt to the AI era?
Mathematicians are not dummies?
Suggesting all the other are dummies? And even if that is what you are suggesting, wouldn't that make them the group that needs support the least?
These days I use AI for development and it feels like my coding skills are getting worse, so I sometimes need rehab, and I'm a bit worried that mathematicians will go through the same thing. Later, since the proof structure is built by AI, I think there will be cases where mathematicians themselves can't touch it (because if they do, they can't tell where and how it will break).
15M really is not a big commitment tbh... university take half, then there is not much left; it can maybe fund <10 groups.
More like incentivizing mathematicians to use AI.
Which is indirectly forcing the mathematicians to use AI?
Is mathematics deprived of the associated knowledge that comes from a human first deriving a proof, how exploring the problem domain including the dead-ends has changed the mathematician's thinking, when a proof is given by AI? It seems that the solving rather than just the solution gave much to mathematics.
> It seems that the solving rather than just the solution gave much to mathematics
The whole discourse of past few weeks has been mathematicians claiming the opposite.
Can you explain to me what "navigation" means if AI actually succeeds at automating mathematics? Or is the bet here that the AI companies will fail to deliver?
So $15M of OpenAI/Anthropic tokens, won't this just encourage more model use that started the "issue" in the first place?
What’s the solution? Not use OpenAI and Anthropic and watch less idealistic peers post breakthroughs?
In some way, yes. The whole situation seems completely grounded in that mathematicians are greedy for status and clout trying to write their name on new discoveries in blood and publish as many papers as possible. And now they are sad because they lost their way to this status.
When you remove this greed and status seeking you might actually end up with a healthy environment.
OpenAI's contribution is funding, separate from compute (not tokens).
15M is the average cost of 5 bay area houses! Not sure what they are even attempting to do with this effort rather than to get some free marketing!
This is the "democratization" in practice. Top pro-AI mathematicians will get the spoils.
Truth about the Simons Foundation (it was an early AI booster) is flagged here. Jim Simons gets a hagiography by a couple of shills. A group of utterly vile people frequents this site.
Lol. I would say these guys made bad life/career choices. They can take care of themselves.
i think tokens for any scientists should be free.
Tokens aren't free, so I guess you mean we should force AI companies to subsidize scientists.
Is it even subsidy after the training? One could argue scientific papers are a huge fraction of the reason LLMs are good
Seems fair when the same companies pilfer public goods like physical infrastructure and our internet privacy.
Genuinely the least they could do for what a pox they are on so many industries, on consumers of electronics, on local municipalities, on the environment...
ok hello I'm a scientist can I have my tokens now
And herein lies the rub: As others have pointed out in another active thread on AI in mathematics: The crisis could be described as one of career, status, and funding vs the general concept of the field. We have now circled back to question of who deserves these tokens!
Google will give free tokens to 10,000 scientists:
https://ai.google/gemini-for-science/
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no i'm sciencing i want my victory tokens and your victory tokens and your victory peptides too 15.10.26 hn ref uncareer doubleplusungood rectify
I for one support using our tax money to fund scientists
I belive that the world would be in a much better place if all science was ultimately funded by a global organization such as UN and patents did not exist. If you are a research group that successfully creates something worth replicating then you should be eligable to receive a grant as well as request grants for projects that cost billions of dollars.
There is some success with this kind of strategy already when it comes to space, LHS and ITER come to mind. NASA is somewhat operating on this very same principle although it is a government organization to begin with.
Although the opposite reaction is that you should keep people behind inventions poor to encourage them to create more inventions which ultimately what ends up happening in the real world more often than not. The people who revolutioned the world did get fame and glory, including numerous monetary compensation packages - but compared to the people who sold those inventions they only got a tiny fraction of a fraction, this is especially clear with people who are normal employees and inventions are credited to a company rather than the few people who made it possible.
May be instead of funding military or other countries, they can fund scientist.. And all the tax funded must be in public domain instead of giving it to private companies.
Aside from the fact that $15M is couch change for these companies, and aside from the fact that this project is hypocritical and self-serving (as explained by many other posts), the whole idea of naming a supposedly large sum of money in a headline in order to impress is just silly. Whether a project is successful or worthwhile has little to do with how much funding may be lined up, and throwing numbers around is often just a smokescreen for poor planning and execution.
They try to transform mathematics to a charity. How generous!!!
Richard Simmons, what a guy
how is that different than what's been happening forever? Mathematics has ALWAYS been a "charity". The only thing that changes over time is who gives the money, first it's the church, then it's princes, then government, it's been corporations for a while, this is nothing new.
Except that even the Cosa Nostra is less anti-human than the current tech bros and their foundation fronts.
You really cannot see any difference between the government and corporations supporting something? This "things have always been that way" talking point is getting out of hand.
Wonder if they realize these types of things help grow massive resentment against such companies? I'm astounded by how terrible the politics of SV actually is.
"One of the foundations responsible for the AI mess bribes mathematicians to accelerate AI."
How shameless can you be?
What mess?