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 -10 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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

[–] lath@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] hikaru755@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

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 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world -1 points 1 day ago

I think you missed the point.