I found this extremely hard, especially if you are trying to convince people that have absolutely non real contact with source code. The false belief is that now with AI you can run on any topic even without knowing how to crawl.
People are immersed into the false believe that now because you can produce an app from night to day you don't need understanding anything at all. And they are absolutely fine with that. And that to me is the key problem: being ok on any topic without understanding and not realizing the cost of it.
I wish people would at least get deeply informed before making harmful decisions and get only lured by snake oil marketing.
In the end I think all math produced from these companies will be their ruin because they essentially show light on the fundamental problem: to advance you need to understand.
The issue with "doing math" is the incentive infrastructure. Modern mathematics research has always been tied with leveraging increasingly potent and numerous computing resources. With LLMs the experts are doing what they do best -- utilizing the latest and greatest. OpenAI leveraged an internal model and investment capital most people couldn't hope to touch. That is a display of strength and privilege.
It's motivated by cold hard cash instead of being driven by it. OpenAI wants more investors, more fuel for the fire, and this is how the company has decided to get it done. Token costs have increased, but so has general usage in the population. This is a PR campaign.
Why do you need to have potent and numerous computing resources to do math? Engineering could be that. But when I think about math the only thing that comes to my mind is a pen and a piece of paper. Not computing power nor even a calculator.
OpenAI really could handle the whole situation better, and it's perfectly fine to call them out on that, but it's not what this piece is about, it's just another AI rant
I found no "AI rant" there, the whole thing is a very reasonable criticism of the (very unethical) behavior of OpenAI when it came to math, and how it poisons the well of AI adoption.
The timeline he provides is actually pretty interesting.
That's the core of all dysfunction - AI or not, isn't it?
People violently smashing through boundaries for their own personal benefit