> they may never again have the joy of being the first to pull up the edge of the tarp of ignorance and see the raw truth beneath _for the first time_

Until we can demonstrate AI consciousness, “seeing the raw truth” will be a human activity. Even now, verifying and understanding these AI proofs is a massive endeavor. Coming up with an intuitive (to humans) distillation of the finding remains an open challenging demanding expertise.

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fl4regun 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

i think to certain types of people (who are probably more likely to be mathematicians), the "self" discovery aspect of it is important, they don't want to read about a new proof for a problem they were grappling with, they want to come about it through their own thoughts.

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halfmatthalfcat 4 hours ago | parent [-]

LLMs are not feeding us things, we are asking it and getting answers. This dialectic I think is super powerful and it still requires the human to ask questions and continue expanding intellectual curiosity to go down the rabbit hole and discover. LLMs are just an incredible rubber duck but the discovery is still there.

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JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> This dialectic

We literally had a case where OpenAI may have stolen the dialectic from a mathematician using its product and then given it to a proprietary model burning tens of millions of dollars of tokens [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_priority...

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fl4regun 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think I disagree, if I had a puzzle on my desk and I told an LLM to explain how to solve it, I think I have robbed myself of the enjoyment of solving the puzzle. Is it really any different than googling a solution?

	▲	halfmatthalfcat an hour ago \| parent [-]
		There are different avenues of "solving" something though. Asking an LLM to one shot something vs iterating on it collaboratively are different ways of achieve potentially different ends. If the result is black and white, then yeah, its probably not super fruitful but if the end result is subjective, then there really no is objective "solve".

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pessimizer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Until we can demonstrate AI consciousness, “seeing the raw truth” will be a human activity.

I don't think this matters a bit. We individually can't demonstrate "consciousness" in other humans, it's not even a word with a definition. What we can do is miss the feeling of discovering something on one's own rather than having it explained to you over and over again until you understand it.

I mean, dead mathematicians are definitely not "conscious," but their books keep you from discovering things that you may have discovered yourself if left to your own devices.

The joy that was mentioned is the joy of knowing a bit of gossip that no one else knows, of being the first explainer. Interpretation is just being able to pass gossip on; a decidedly lesser joy. And there's no reason that AI shouldn't be able to explain findings in an intuitive way - LLMs at least purely operate based on human intuition as written in human communications and then captured in matrices.

If these proofs are good (doubtful, imo) and can be reduced (intuitively distilled, sorry), there's no reason that an LLM shouldn't be able to do that.