It feels like the scene from Blazing Saddles where Mel Brooks' character says "We've got to protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen."

If the math community was previously not entirely aligned with what society was expecting, and these changes threaten that previous arrangement, that sounds like a "you" problem for math, not a problem for OpenAI.

If they can't align with society's needs and demands then some creative destruction is coming their way.

Let's figure out how to use the iron fist of the state to keep people from doing things the math establishment doesn't like?

Yeah, that's really great for humanity. Just super.

A world of cheap AI makes research available to anyone who can afford to run the AI, in a similar way to how ubiquitous cheap computing hardware has made software development possible at the personal level.

Tao's blog is a nice example of human interpretation of math. He explains in an understandable but rigorous way beyond what would just be in a journal paper (or the output of an AI).

Specifically: bearish on LLMs generally, not bearish on LLMs for pure math.

yes, huge for pure math and activities that look like it.

Doesn't really even need to look like it. If you can verify rewards, RLVR will optimize really really well. If you can't... it's a struggle. There are probably fewer fields where you can verify rewards than one might hope.

> There are probably fewer fields where you can verify rewards than one might hope.

2 tasks I've done today that I believe robots are nowhere near being able to do: Cleaning my wardrobe and draining bad fuel out of my generator. As in generic use cases.

Hard to verify that your wardrobe is clean. Also hard to verify that the bad fuel is out without physical sensors. Many, many tasks are quite difficult to verify beyond "you know it when you see it". That doesn't work so well for training a model.

Now estimate how much that propellant will cost per kg of payload to orbit.

The problem with expensive launch in the past wasn't due to propellant cost.

> someone will come up with the bright idea of serialized novels again

You mean, like on Reddit? ;)

The "moon landings didn't happen" conspiracies are, of course, inane, but they come from an understandable place. If moon landings really did happen, how could they just have stopped? There's a disconnect between the event and the consequences.

The resolution is to realize that Apollo was a dead-end stunt, not some universe-altering historical event. The lack of consequences was an inevitable result of the structure of what Apollo was.

Yeah, if you read a bit into the the pre-lunar-Apollo era, the plans were sensible - LEO space stations, space shipyards and orbital assembly, lunar space stations, eventually a landing and a surface stations & resource usage. All gradual sustainable infrastructure building.

Then all that went out the airlock & the whole thing devolved into a long-term unsustainable race. :P

Those plans were only sensible if launch costs could be greatly reduced.

It ended up that the government-contractor axis wasn't able to reduce launch costs, not due to technical reason, but political and institutional ones. There had to be a different approach, as pursued by SpaceX.

Yeah, but I think it is all related - there were various programs to reuse the Saturn and other rockets, there are pictures of them dunking engines in the sea & studying what it does to them or even the rather insane concept for a giant helicopter for catching the first stage of Saturn V. Reading the early space program history it really looks like the consensus was "of course we will reuse those rockets, it would be insane to not do so".

But then as time pressure set in & money was suddenly not a problem, all that went to the wayside. And by the time Apollo was over, it seems the mindset that rockets are expensive and expandable set in. If it was just inertia or also business interests of the by then entrenched launcher contractors is hard to tell.

That's a very bad take. Rocket costs are not driven by physics, they're driven by more mundane issues, like single-use hardware. The cost floor dictated by cost of propellant is remarkably low.

Yeah, the moment propellant drives your launch costs, you have effectively won the chemical rocket launch game.

And can then transition to more advanced stuff, like space resource extraction (so you can only launch important bits), launch loops/skyhooks/tether shenanigans in general, etc.

People think rockets use tremendous amounts of fuel, but a Falcon 9's fuel is only slightly more than half the weight of the fuel in a fully fueled 747. There's also a lot of oxidizer (about 2.5x as much as the fuel) but LOX is very cheap, the second cheapest industrial liquid after water.