Part of The AI Control Crisis · 11 stories · since Sep 4 · newest 30m ago
Engineers swap notes on taming AI-generated code's hidden failure modesLudwig low-code AI framework circulates on Hacker News
7 Sep 9 6:56 AM · 15d ago · 5 articles · 31 posts · 81 comments · 5 sources · development 7 of 7
A GitHub repository for Ludwig, a low-code framework for building custom AI systems, is posted to Hacker News as part of the ongoing thread of AI-development tooling discussion.
sitecmd.com blog author self-described senior software engineer, blog authorJimmy Miller software engineer, blog author (jimmyhmiller.com)Daniel Lemire computer scientist, blog author
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Reported in the same hours no headline names this development itself — these 4 claims were published in its stretch
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first by Lobsters, 13d ago
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first by What's new, 13d ago
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1 outlet A Misalignment of AI in Mathematics
first by HN Frontpage, 13d ago
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first by Scientific American, 13d ago
What people said 24 voices · best of 94 · verbatim
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Feels identical to what is happening in software to me. > 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. Sounds like what I try to do every day. All that old schpiel we used to say about…
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Noted mathematician Terrence Tao has coordinated a great open letter about AI and society. The technology in use now will never become sentient. How it is used and who owns it are the actual issues to consider. Humans have not achieved anything close to alignment among ourselves, and that is the real issue rather than imaginary scenarios about…
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>> Famous problems have often served as landmarks and lighthouses against which one can measure an improved understanding of this landscape. Solving one of these problems has been a certain sign of new insights and interesting methods, which would then be studied by a community of mathematicians, through a long and arduous process of talks…
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The situation seems analogous indeed. However, cynically, I do wonder whether the outcome will differ across the CS and math industry once the dust settles. One could argue that software production is funded in large part for the end product, not the process, whereas mathematics is far more exploratory. More concretely, it seems to me that an…
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> We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work, with misalignment between the outcome of the use of AI and its initial purpose. 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…
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Aye, it's hard to deny that software has a function at least somewhat divorced from the process of its creation, although it's still up in the air for me as to how much. I am oddly optimistic to see this issue so starkly realized in the field of mathematics. If we can come to consensus that "proof factories" are not really helpful, that's at least…
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As a software engineer, 6 months ago. I was better than AI in essentially every way except raw typing speed.Now AI has surpassed me in fine-grained problem-solving ability. It can write more reliable code than I can, faster than I can, provided it is given the right guidance.But one thing that I'm still much better at is identifying technical…
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@pushcx, could you merge this into https://lobste.rs/s/xsbz3l/severe_misalignment_ai_mathematics (or vice versa)?
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I am gobsmacked by this letter.Every one of the mathematicians on this letter was likely aware of the progress in AI, and knew this was coming if they were honest with themselves. Some have even helped pushed the agenda forward. Inevitably, there would be a day when AI would find solutions to problems that defined the field. That day has come…
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It's also identical to what HAD happened to software cf. The Rise of Worse is Better. Human slop happens well before AI slop. Now it's only getting worse!
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But the work the Mochizuki case generated can also be done by AI. AI could generate a landmark proof and then people could use it to solve or simplify intermediate problems and you could use a different AI prompt to try to disprove it if you were really skeptical. From my memory I think they said it took 88 hours to solve a Millenium Problem…
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One question I have is whether/how AI "solutions" make it back into future models. I've sort of naively assumed that AI companies basically scrape the web in large swaths, do a bit curating, and train. In a case where an AI solves math problems, I conjecture, that lots of text is created documenting that the discovery happened (only because its…
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This is a PR problem, not a mathematical problem. It's possibly the worst PR problem mathematics has faced since the execution of Hippasus for whistleblowing on the cover-up of the regular dodecahedron. It's still a PR problem.So what went wrong? Mathematics education. Math below grad school is all about solving stated problems. Credit is given…
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I think your question is adjacent to Model Collapse? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_collapse Not directly, as you're focused on how specific knowledge gets emphasized/deemphasized as a second-order effect of LLMs "taking over" a field, but it seems like a similar issue. In at least some conditions retraining on e.g. LLM-generated proofs might…
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I agree with many of the sentiments here. But an open letter signed exclusively by Fields Medalists that purport to define precisely what the "mathematical community" (who is inside and outside) and what their goals are raises my hackles for some reason.It is true that the manufacturing of "true/false" statements is not the same as gaining…
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> The goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathematical community are severely misaligned. We see these as part of broader alignment issues impacting other scientific and creative professions, as well as the whole of society. The frontier labs' business model is entirely based on extracting value from other's work. If they had to fairly…
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It reminds me of Frédéric Bastiat's Candle Makers' Petition. It satirised protectionism in the 1800s:>We candlemakers are suffering from the unfair competition of a foreign rival. This foreign manufacturer of light has such an advantage over us that he floods our domestic markets with his product. And he offers it at a fantastically low price…
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The quote at the top is inspiring but not realistic. Humans have long produced proofs that are difficult to follow and there are many proofs that only a few understand after long and specialized study. It seems out of place to me to complain about mathematical discoveries made by computers simply because they might be hard to understand by humans…
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As a consumer of mathematics, I want to attack the author’s idea of “what that work was meant to achieve in the first place”.I do a lot of programming that uses mathematics. I designed the error recovery file format “par2”. I worked as a quantitative trader.What do I want from math? To be able to search math results, understand them, and apply…
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Yeah as a profession and a discipline, I don't feel that we as computer scientists have done the self-reflection about the purpose of our work that mathematicians have. I can't imagine the ACM publishing a statement like this. :(
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I understand this stance and where they are coming from, but I can't help but think this sounds very analogous to engineers' arguments against AI-assisted and vibe-coding, especially with regard to cognitive debt. Yet the software industry is plowing ahead, reportedly pushing mountains of unreviewed code to Prod, and the world hasn't ended.Of…
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I don't think that this is the same as with software. For many (but not all) software applications, the end goal is to have working software that accomplishes a specific task, not building a human conceptual understanding of a problem space. Like, when I use the website for a restaurant, I want to know what's on the menu and maybe be able to order…
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As a mathematician maybe I am a little more optimistic than this declaration.I am thinking of Mochizuki's abc conjecture: He worked in relative isolation, and dumped a huge incomprehensible proof on the community (to oversimplify a bit). That's not totally unlike what might happen if AI generates a huge, incomprehensible proof of let's say…
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I agree partially, and feel that many software folks have been doing work that was more or less pointless, such as your restaurant website example. These problems are solved, and tooling/generators almost always exists that can accomplish the same without programmer involvement. However, outside of the low/no-code domain, (and we've seen time and…
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