c/australia · by Arwu@programming.dev · 8h

Racing to solve maths problems now 'pointless', says Australian at centre of OpenAI controversy

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-11/racing-to-solve-maths-problems-pointless-tristan-buckmaster-says/107141628

23 points · 11 comments · view on lemmy.world

11 Comments

Professor Buckmaster said some mathematicians had stopped publicly sharing what they were working on to avoid tipping off AI companies about their plans.

He has called on academics and people from OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind to discuss ground rules for how they worked together.

He said the companies' power carried responsibilities that went beyond competing to solve problems before their rivals.

These big AI companies act like all other capitalist corporations. They're raiders and unless their founders, funders and operatives are reined in we are going to go straight into lawless techno barbarism, even worse than the decadent system we have now. Jacob Coxon is the latest to give us a warning: https://www.nine.com.au/world-news/artificial-intelligence-news-ai-employee-jacob-coxon-quits-over-safety-concerns-20260910-p60vzv.html

TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world · -4 pts · 7h (8 replies)

Wasn't solving maths problems always a bit pointless? Not sure mathematicians necessarily pursued the field because of its pointfullness

lath@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 7h (4 replies)

No. I can't give any examples because I personally don't give a damn, but there have been 'pointlessly' solved equations which only became of use much later in modern branches of technology.

Random crap nobody cares about have a small chance to be useful in the far future for stuff we currently are unaware of.

TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world · -3 pts · 7h (3 replies)

I mean my point being that traditionally, least historically, the idea of maths being solved for the purpose of a useful function was a bit banal, a bit frowned upon or looked down on.

lath@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 7h (2 replies)

Oh, snobbism. I see, my bad.

TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 7h (1 reply)

Yeah that was like their whole thing.

blind3rdeye@aussie.zone · 2 pts · 5h

And by 'they', do you mean the hypothetical mathematicians in your mind that would prefer that their maths is not applicable to any kind of practical applications?

hikaru755@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 6h

Pointless as in "the end result might not be useful for any real world application", often yes. But as I understand it, now it's become a different flavor of pointless, "might not even be able to solve it before an AI steals the work I've done so far, solves it before I can, and gets all the credit", which takes even the intrinsic motivation out of it.

Tenderizer@aussie.zone · 1 pts · 7h (1 reply)

Any maths to do with cryptography certainly isn't pointless. So P=NP is definitely consequential.

TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 7h

I think you missed the point.

makeshift0546@lemmy.today · -5 pts · 5h

Two separate issues.

open ai jumped in at the tail end and spent money and stole logs. The researchers would have never had access to for credit but if he had he should have been using them.
Researchers better get used to it and not be pouty when a computer is able to finish up the theory after throwing compute at a problem. This is some sci-emo cry for me bullshit.