I get that Tao is a mathematician first and I respect the fact that he stays 'in his wheelhouse' (he didn't write the post but he did post it on his blog). But I think it would be fair to extrapolate and to wonder about this question not just for mathematics but for all of science. Keep in mind that scientific knowledge can be hoarded or used to patent stuff and that there is plenty of evidence that OpenAI, Anthropic and possibly others are going to go after other sources of income[1] than just selling access to their AI inference engines.

I can imagine a future where these companies become the new Zaibatsus[2] holding patents across a wide variety of subject and with mutually re-inforcing silos of proprietary technology created by in-house AI that the rest of the world financed but does not have access to.

[1] For instance: https://www.reuters.com/world/anthropic-quietly-sets-up-biol...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaibatsu

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howunfortunate an hour ago | parent [-]

Intellectual property laws never totally made sense to me in the first place, but they make even less sense in the age of AI.

Who's "intellectual property" are we protecting, exactly, when a machine generates the knowledge?

I hope we can update before it's too late to matter.

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jacquesm an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Intellectual property laws - like most laws - favor those with a lot of money and that's why you see this asymmetry between say artists, consumers and labels/record companies. The latter simply have far more money and besides they get to optimize their efforts because they are essentially immortal.

AI and AI companies have a similar pathway open to them where they will take a lot of information already out there and then gatekeep the synthesis based on that information (obtained without compensation in most cases) as well as to harvest all of the latent knowledge underneath. This is a bad development in my opinion but I'm sure that their shareholders believe it is great.

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glimshe 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

This. Maybe AI will help make it clear that strong IP law was never about the starving musician or the heroic author who wrote his award winning novel under candle light. It is about mega property pools that will do anything in their power to maintain that property forever.

	▲	jacquesm 36 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It may have started like that though, but it definitely isn't how it is used today.
	▲	123akk111 29 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That is simply not true and just the opinion of people who know nothing about artists. The same misinformation exists about music agencies, who organize concerts and take a hefty fee. But those were welcomed by musicians. In the early days (18th century), musicians had to do advertising themselves when traveling to a new city. The innovation was to have an impresario (literally someone who travels ahead of them) to do the organizing. What musicians don't want is Internet middlemen who pretend to act in their interests and take an even higher cut.

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andai an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

See also: Monkey selfie copyright dispute

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

I suppose it's worth distinguishing the type of machine though.

If a genetic algorithm comes up with a unique design and I patent it, that's okay, right?

I think the main issue with LLMs is what went into them. Like we saw recently with Anthropic's revolutionary source control breakthroughs, which turned out to already be in the training data:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094694

	▲	jacquesm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> If a genetic algorithm comes up with a unique design and I patent it, that's okay, right? That depends. To what degree was your input decisive? Did you come up with the genetic algorithm? Is your patent written in a way that it tries to stop others from generating antennas using genetic algorithms?