YHK - yet another hacker news clone

How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?

47 points jjgreen 2 days ago 25 comments

cyanydeez 2 days ago | parent

wouldn't it be dystopian secrecy cause a flock camera is equally capable of watching the mathematicians as it is the public citizens.

kakacik 1 hour ago | parent

Maybe mathematicians are smart enough to never ever buy such piece of shit on higher principle, regardless of their actual fiasco?

BigTTYGothGF 56 minutes ago | parent

I am a (former) mathematician and know many more.

> Maybe mathematicians are smart enough to never ever buy such piece of shit on higher principle

They are not. Mathematicians are as human as most of the rest of us here.

rramadass 1 day ago | parent

> Regardless of the true cost, it seems that professional mathematicians now need to wary about what they put into a LLM and think hard about how to disclose and publish a result.

This is all but guaranteed now.

Mathematicians/Scientists/Researchers need to stop sharing freely with "AI Companies" and have explicit clauses in place in their publications about not using their research without their explicit consent.

There should be a clear legal distinction between using research data for AI model-training vs. another researcher using it.

Come up with a legal framework, establish procedures for sharing and using others work and have a single scientific body in charge of enforcing it.

JMKH42 1 hour ago | parent

The USA doesn't have legal frameworks any more, you just buy and sell the right to do what you want. Even our supreme court is disingenuous now.

nradov 1 hour ago | parent

Just putting a clause in a publication won't prevent it from being used as training data. Information wants to be free.

The frontier LLM vendors do sell enterprise licenses which contractually guarantee that your prompts won't be used for training. (Maybe they'll secretly violate the agreement but in principle it's legally enforceable.) Scholars and universities who care about credit and attribution will either have to purchase those licenses or run their own private open-weight LLM instances.

Analemma_ 1 hour ago | parent

I don't like this and I wish it weren't true, but I think the period of "information wants to be free" is coming to an end, it was a relic of a bygone era. Increasingly, making your information free means you're the sucker who is doing free labor for AI companies, or worse, you're helping your competitors. Paywalls, login walls, and rate-limits are going up everywhere: there's the GitLab news on the home page right now, and sites like Twitter, Reddit etc. which used to be publicly-readable are now gated (and Xitter is using the legal system to shut down any bypasses).

I hate this but I don't think there's any going back now that LLMs exist.

pavel_lishin 1 hour ago | parent

"Information wants to be free" never meant that people want to release their information; it meant that information is very hard to keep secret, and that everything leaks like a sieve, and especailly that once it's out, it's out forever.

oldsecondhand 32 minutes ago | parent

Even the $20 tier of ChatGPT has privacy settings that forbid using the user's data to be used for training. The question is, whether this setting is respected.

sobiolite 1 hour ago | parent

Would this legal framework cut both ways? When AI companies use AI to make and publish mathematical discoveries, would they be able to legally prevent professional mathematicians from using them?

perching_aix 1 hour ago | parent

I'd guess universities might starting hosting open source models. They can probably actually afford to, unlike individual mathematicians.

Though maybe if there's a flurry of math-optimized agents coming up, like there are small coding agents, those might be feasible to host personally.

ndriscoll 1 hour ago | parent

Simple: if you don't publish your work, we don't fund you. Why is this even a question?

watwut 46 minutes ago | parent

This is about cooperation before publishing results. And they will keep everything medieval secret, else some big company steals it and claims it their own.

optimiz3 1 hour ago | parent

Similar principle applies to open source or any other creative endeavor put in the public domain.

Ancalagon 42 minutes ago | parent

anyone else already experiencing this in a corporate environment? I know I am. Its not just between teams either, its within them.

FridgeSeal 28 minutes ago | parent

The age of a Warhammer 40k Tech Priest is upon us! Praise to the Machine God.

Just, without the aliens, space travel, or mech-suits.

Got half the other downsides though!

whythismatters 16 minutes ago | parent

More on the upcoming priesthood and monasteries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743400

mmooss 22 minutes ago | parent

Would you expand on your experiences? Can you not share ideas now? What if you enhance them with an LLM before sharing them?

Ancalagon 20 minutes ago | parent

I misinterpreted the article. Its more about sharing ideas within the company, because teams and team members are apt to steal ideas and implement them with AI faster than the originator. I guess this was always theoretically a problem but its especially pronounced now because of the commonality of layoffs, and exacerbated at my company due to the failing stock price.

mmooss 24 minutes ago | parent

Stop treating AI companies and their software as somehow unconstrained, above-the-law actors. It's delusional that anyone buys that. Regulate them appropriately.

At the same time, mathematicians should be using sophisticated, specialized LLM tools in much more sophisticated ways than lay people. There should be no way lay people can compete. There are new tools to master and if you use your slide rule, you won't keep up. It's a chance for mathematics productivity to boom.

Terr_ 10 minutes ago | parent

> Stop treating

With apologies to Baudelaire: The greatest trick exploitative forces ever played was convincing the people that it was impossible to imagine anything else.

Arubis 17 minutes ago | parent

Like we can prevent the rest of our society from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy: by treating individuals with respect and dignity and not as the ore from which resources can be profitably extracted.

FactNotFeeling 16 minutes ago | parent

Any solutions to this issue that aren't unrealistic socialist pipe dreams?

kouru225 8 minutes ago | parent

Might as well go tell depressed people to just stop being depressed