The way a lot of you are engaging with Tao and other mathematicians' concerns about AI is really starting to bother me. You know nothing about this field. Tao does, to put it mildly. Have he and other mathematicians always articulated their concerns perfectly? No, but who has? If top mathematicians say that the journey often matters more than the destination, including as relates to the practical impact of pure math on other fields, maybe you should consider that they could be right. For my part, it strikes me as very plausible that they are. The years of work human mathematicians might have otherwise dedicated to solving EACH of the problems OAI has solved in a span of months could have launched a dozen other research directions, which could have launched more of their own, which could have launched still more, and so on. Multiply for every previous and subsequent major problem AI has and will solve. You're kidding yourself if you think the same thing is going to happen via mathematicians picking through OAI's solutions in search of understanding after-the-fact, rather than doing the bottom-up work to arrive at them themselves. What's ironic about the whole situation is that many of the folks mocking Tao are the same willing to engage in wildly implausible speculation about how reward-hacking superintelligences will level the Earth. Did you ever consider that THIS—what AI is doing to math—is a much more credible candidate for what malign, super intelligent reward-hacking actually looks like? Unlike genocide via paper clip-maximization, this is happening NOW and many of the people who it is happening TO are telling you in no uncertain terms that it is very bad! To be clear: mathematicians are not a monolith and you wouldn't be required to agree with them even if they were. But cruelly dismissing their concerns for the intellectual project many of them have spent their entire lives cultivating—when they ALSO have a credible case that automating frontier math is net bad for humanity—shows a stunning lack of humility. It also shows that many of the folks who claim to care about "AI alignment" are really only interested in the subject if it fits their preconceived, often anti-empirical notion of what alignment problems look like. If mathematicians like Tao are right, then we have what is maybe the first case of catastrophic misalignment on our hands and many of you are responding by ... mocking its most immediate victims? Hard not to conclude that many of you care more about these issues as vectors for intellectual status-seeking than anything to do with the future of our species.