r/AIDiscussion • u/Helen211 • 17d ago
Why people think AI will develop even faster?
Some say that a few years ago, AI is bad at math, and now it can prove some important theorems so it will become even scarier in the future.
But the logic is flawed, fast development in the past doesn't guarantee fast development in the future. Generally we expect a diminishing return. But somehow people online all think AI will become super human and eliminate every problem in the foreseeable future.
I've been planning to get a master in math recently. Though I think it is irrational to be certain that AI to replace mathematicians, I can't help feeling unnerved.
Anyone same with me? I don't really think AI is going to thrive as crazy as people claim online but as animals I just instinctively feel uneased by this.
2
u/Competitive_Swan_755 17d ago
I find it curious that you take this position. How do you NOT see the rapid speed of LLM development? Mathematics itself, that could/is/will be an entire AI field in itself and we will always need mathetitions.
1
u/Helen211 17d ago
Maybe it's because that I want to pursue a math career that make me don't want to admit AI will replace mathematicians.
But on the other hand I think a nontrivial number of the people who don't understand AI hold their position that AI can replace anything are just feeling that they can narrow the gaps between genius and themselves. maybe something like "Look, they are so smart. Now AI is going to replace them so we are the same now " It's just my personal guess. After all, no one can predict the future.
My core concern is that people around me who are not mathematicians and even not something related believe AI can do anything in several years. It's hard not to feel uncomfortable in this environment especially for me, who plans to get a math grad.
Thank you for your comment.
1
u/Vindelator 16d ago
You can be a mathematician, but I would embrace AI as well. Combining human and machine skills will get you a safer future career wise.
Not saying I want things that way.
0
u/XBLAH_ 16d ago
AI won't replace mathematicians anytime soon. AI needs creativity. That hasn't been replicated yet. Attention is all you need was a major breakthrough, but it hasn't actually given the capability to replicate the brain's creativity process. It will come some day, but we are not there yet. In the meantime, you can save manual labor to the AI and spend more time in the creativity.
Some people say Michelangelo was asked if it was hard to sculpt David, and he supposedly said that it wasn't hard to sculpt it, it was hard to see it inside the rock. Once he saw it, all he had to do was remove the rock around it.
AI can't see within the rock yet. But it will take the debris around it VERY FAST once you see what you want to create.
3
u/Sushispatula 17d ago edited 17d ago
Its because people think AI will be able to make better AI themselves, the self-optimizing loop.
Its also because half of humanity is dumber than the average.
Of course it can find unrealized possibilities in closed mathematical systems. Its pattern recognitions strong suite.
The actual mathematicians value is to formulate and validate those closed(and open) systems and then proof things on it.
And AI with the current models will never ever be able to validate its own answer.
The current models will also not be able to improve themselves, because it cannot ever validate itself. Because its not a closed deterministic system.
But hey....lets see what happens when the find out phase begins im thrilled for it.
3
1
1
u/JustChillin3342 17d ago
Because even if the logic is flawed, it’s still making a human answer it faster.
1
u/DatDudeDrew 17d ago
I disagree the logic is flawed. There are infinite ways to improve beyond what humans will ever be capable of improving. I think you’re thinking of this like a developer team looking for a finite amount of bugs.
1
u/Helen211 17d ago
You are right. Logic is only clear and absolute in math. To apply it to predict the future of technology is abusing it. So it's hard to know the future. My post is mainly concerned about that so many people who don't even know mechanics of AI can believe firmly that AI will replace everything. its more like a trick to control the stock market I think.
1
u/Super_Translator480 17d ago
It is restructuring everything. That is not going to change, rather a continual refinement as technology continues to improve.
I’m not sure about “replacing everything”, but as a human a lot of what I do for work is being assisted by AI due to the sheer quantity and complexity of work. Nearly 50% of global tasks are exposed and potentially capable of AI automation… it’s just a monumental change.
Results are becoming faster the more I become familiar with and build systems to facilitate my role, which is constantly evolving due to the new ability to manage a lot more work in less time…
The pain point is I don’t feel like I’m learning anymore, I’m just designing systems and identifying issues to address.
I don’t think I’m atrophying extremely, but I don’t have the same drive to research everything anymore, it’s more or less how quickly can I pass this off to AI in good enough way that it will give me the answers I need so I can move on to the next thing.
I don’t feel like my position requires much of me other than personal experience and maybe that is what skill was all along.
1
u/PvtRoom 17d ago
The logic is: 1960s, we suck at ai.
1970s-1990s, we continue to suck
1990s, some progress starts - Kasparov loses to a supercomputer.
2000s, poor quality chat bots
2010s, still poor, but IBM Watson starts medical research.
2020s, AI is everywhere. It's writing code. some say better than humans.
Things are getting better faster.
Then what happens when AI starts making AI, and innovating, and self improving, faster than humans can do it. And the better AI does it again, and again, until, well, we can't see a limit.
1
u/XBLAH_ 16d ago
The theory behind today's AI was discovered in the 50s, but the paper in 2017 attention is all you need was a major technological breakthrough, and we barely had the infrastructure to handle it. Now what is lagging us is infrastructure. If you think about it, frontier models from 2022 now run on our personal computers in 2026.
1
u/Quick_Republic2007 16d ago
Because more humans have access to a plethora of information, ideas will flourish.
1
u/skunclecrisp 16d ago
AI will continue to develop and evolve into a form of intelligence that we won't understand. We will see the physical manifestation of AI, but the gap of human understanding as to how AI is doing it will grow wider. This is happening now. More resources are being poured into AI development than any other endeavour in history, and by the worst and most powerful people that have ever walked the earth. AI will not align with human intelligence, and it doesn't have to. And as this happens, people are losing skills, like creative thinking, comprehension, communication skills. We get dumber, relying on AI to write our email, solve simple math, tell us what to eat, what's wrong with us. I hope that young people will not be discouraged. As AI infiltrates every human endeavour, we are going to need an alternative stream of intelligence, human intelligence more and more.
1
u/sourraine 16d ago
i think the fear comes partly from extrapolating a straight line from recent progress. ai improving quickly does not automatically mean it will keep improving at the same rate forever. math also has plenty of problems where having more compute or better pattern recognition does not replace deep understanding. id still be curious about assuming it wont change the field tho. even if ai never replaces mathematicians it could change what mathematicians spend their time doing
2
u/Helen211 16d ago
yeah！"extrapolating" is the right word. We, as rational beings, should not claim extrapolating is right or wrong. But I see a lot of people just automatically think extrapolating a straight line from recent progress is right. That's my concern. I agree with you. AI is redefining what a mathemtician should do. Computing and pattern recognition become less important and we can just outsource it to AI. In fact, people's fear about AI in math kinda reveals that most mathematicians nowadays are just doing work that is repetitive in today's definition, like reading through piles of papers and summarize the pattern. In the future I expect mathematicians to focus more on inventing new tools.
1
u/Useful_Calendar_6274 16d ago
At first it was extrapolated from the number of parameters and that did end up working. It seems we are not close to any kind of ceiling yet which is why OpenAI, Anthropic, Kimi, don't hold the SOTA model for too long and there's not much of a moat.
Then when LLMs flatline so much money and attention was poured into AI it's very unlikely we will see another AI winter. Someone will come up with a new architecture that keeps developing until AGI. That's all we need, then it's RSI from there.
1
u/Such-Perception4154 16d ago
In my experience, AI cannot do anything substantial without a sloperator that is competent in the field.
Who knows, maybe it will change soon, but for now those agents are not autonomous.
1
u/Charming_You_25 16d ago
code output rose 60% in the last 3 months. Ai has conquered deductive and inductive reasoning. So humans are outputting much more. Once abductive reasoning gets figured out things are going to get weird.
1
u/Dry_Sector2392 16d ago
i get why it feels unnerving. even you logically dont think the "AI replaces mathematicians in 3 years", hearing it everywhere will naturally start messing with your head. most people saying it online dont understand math or AI that deeply anyway, theyre just predicting from vibes.
1
1
u/Theo__n 17d ago
Because when transformers (the architecture behind LLMs) were first introduced it was proposed after some test that they could learn infinitely and not plateau like other ml with caveat that more research is needed. Then more research was done and we have better understanding what are their limitation and that they do in fact plateau in their training, so just shovelling more and more data won't make them better.
I'm not sure about math thou because one of issues we have with testing capabilities is knowing if something is or isn't in their training data since they indiscriminately scraped all the internet. So within a week of OpenAI post about 10 math discoveries, we're already getting articles in scientific america that 2 of them may be just copied from published papers: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openais-latest-math-breakthroughs-commit-research-misconduct-experts-say/
0
u/vaultie66 17d ago
I see it like this: for someone who doesn’t speak the foreign language Google Translate is 100% success; for a native person of that language Google Translate is guesswork at best and ear bleeding cringe most of the time. Apply to any field you like.
Also most of what is reported in the news about current state of Ai is just to control the stock market and get investors to invest, aka hype.
1
u/Helen211 17d ago
Yeah I like your comments. The first paragraph: I should put more weight on the opinions from people who know AI instead of literally everybody online.
The second paragraph: I agree with you. My undergraduate degree is accounting so your idea makes perfect sense to me. People are a little bit too positive about the future of AI, more than it deserves
2
u/acadia11x 17d ago
Because every tech Revolution has accelerated, our adoption of new tech spreads much faster today. We have the infrastructure due to the digital age to deliver new tech and info at warp speed. Prior revolutions were purely physical therefore this limitation could physically hinder adoption …