Campuses are nice. They have tree-lined quadrangles, old ivy covered buildings, cozy pubs and stately houses. They're especially appealing in the current fall season, and they bring back fond memories.

This change will make data centers much more welcome in our communities. I have one other suggestion for the AI companies: They should put together a football team for each site. That would really bring about a festive atmosphere.

Why? Do you even pay anything for data? You probably pay a fixed amount for the physical connection and right to use your provider's network.

Much of the present-day debate regarding the use of LLMs and generative AI centers around topics such as necessity, accuracy, intellectual property rights, utility, efficiency, economics, worker protections, environmental impact, and future developments. But very little, it seems, is focused on what I think is really at stake, which is the centralization of authoritative truth.

If we regard such models and algorithms as "tools," then yes, there are advantages as well as disadvantages. We can discuss the benefits in productivity/efficiency/knowledge synthesis/discovery as much as we can discuss its impact on the labor market. We could also add in the context of where the training data came from, and whether the originators of such data possess rights to its use in this manner. We could talk at length about how data centers impact the environment in which they are built as well as the energy demands they make. We could endlessly speculate on various predictions for this technology as it might impact the human civilization long-term.

But what I would like to do is make a simpler statement, which is that at its core, these models--and in particular, the way they are being commodified and therefore utilized--represents a fundamental regression of the democratization of human knowledge. Some may say that, by assembling such vast quantities of information in this manner and then making it accessible to the world through the internet, we are improving access. After all, people who are not artists are using it to generate "art"; people who are not programmers are using it to "vibe code" computer applications; and in general, people who are not previously taught in a domain of knowledge through traditional means are using it to appear to attain a certain degree of competency. This is a seriously flawed argument; one that does not become more persuasive if the LLMs become more accurate, more knowledgable, or more capable.

What I mean by "democratization" is not simply about access to knowledge. It is about who controls that access, who curates it, who says it is the truth, who is accountable for the consequences of its use, and who teaches the critical thinking skills that facilitate its interpretation. In all these respects, the entities who have created and commodified these models are failing miserably, and if we look at their behavior, all of the evidence very clearly points to sinister motivations--that is, the failure is intentional. These people do not want you to think and reason and learn for yourselves, because that threatens their ability to sell that capability to you, and more importantly, to be the ultimate arbiter of truth.

It's a red herring to argue that individual humans are more fallible in their judgment, less objective, less knowledgeable in scope; thus are more prone to believing lies. The accuracy argument is misdirection. The point is, if we don't have the capability to interrogate and question, if we leave that to the machine, who is pulling the levers on that machine? And in a rather frighteningly perverse way, it may actually be preferable to have a human in control of that, as megalomanical, authoritarian, and evil as they may be, than having the machine in control. But this is my point--we shouldn't be letting this kind of centralization of power to occur in the first place. I don't want a dictatorship of knowledge, whether or not an oligarch trillionaire or the machine itself is in command of it.

So yes, I object to this technology, in as much as I object to, say, making nuclear weapons. People can point to "positive" examples of the technology--we've heard the arguments that these weapons keep us safe through a policy of mutually assured destruction; or that the underlying physics have given us nuclear energy, therapeutic radiation for treating cancer, and all kinds of other knowledge about the universe we live in. But will any of that matter if those weapons are used? Now ask yourself who has the power to use them, and what their motivations might be. When faced with the evidence, should we not be similarly skeptical of LLMs/genAI?

When someone says "I don't care" in this context, it isn't an expression of indifference, as if the issue doesn't have any material impact on them. It's an expression of DISDAIN. For example, when someone says "I don't care what Trump thinks," it is reasonable to infer that they mean that his thinking is fundamentally wrong and unworthy of discourse. That he is not someone whose thoughts are to be respected or regarded with any value.

We DO need to stop these arrogant sociopaths. And we do that by refusing to buy into the explotative ecosystems and false narratives they push on us. But let's not read too literally into what is a common expression of frustration and twist its intended meaning.

Why should I care what this dumb asshole thinks? If he takes up entire world's supply of RAM, then with what devices will we be able to presumably pay for the privilege to access his AI models? Is he really suggesting that we all go back to the days of running dumb terminals?

What is this CEO disease, where they all think that just because they run a company, that they are suddenly subject matter experts for every domain of knowledge that built said company? Like, somehow just by being in a leadership position, they suddenly have the knowledge of all the engineers, developers, and technicians who built the product, as if they built everything with their bare hands? And what is with this mass delusion that so many people--shareholders included--buy this absurd narrative?

Fuck this guy and fuck his arrogant "I'm the leader so I'm a visionary who can say and do no wrong" attitude. Put them all on a spaceship and blast them out of the solar system.

If we build it, then it will frictionlessly tell us what to build.

This reminds me of a segment I saw about 15 or 20 years ago on a show called "How It's Made" that played on a channel like the Discovery Channel (before all cable became reality TV).

The segment was "How CRTs are Made". I was kind of surprised that CRTs were still being made, but I was especially surprised by the fact that they appeared to be American workers in the factory. They were doing everything pretty much by hand with no automation, and they were making some rather skinny looking CRTs. The show never elaborated on what the CRTs were for, but they sure didn't look like TVs.

I dug into it a bit after that using some clues I noticed in the show, and found out that these were cockpit displays for F15s or similar military aircraft. It's probably an item that you just don't go changing the specs on, and they understandably aren't going to farm out to TCL. I can't imagine how much each one cost, though. And I certainly wouldn't try to rack it up as a "win" for any of GWB's or Obama's trade policies.

But that's exactly my point: if all you want or need is competence, then according to the professor's own admission, an AI will do that. No need for your job, no need for grants, no need to teach. What is the purpose of teaching future generations if an AI will be better at mathematics than you ever can be?

And what I am saying is that either (1) the framing of AI as being the hyper-competent replacement for everything intellectual that we do is fundamentally flawed, and/or (2) it is necessary to understand, for the well-being of our own species, that "competence" and "results" are not the end-all and be-all of a task.

If we fail to appreciate the importance of doing and learning things for their own sake, and to find satisfaction in that process, then we will cede the task of thinking to machines. We can already see early signs of this. And the consequences of this short sightedness is catastrophic.

Let's be clear about the nature of education. Before a student reaches a particular level of self-discipline during their formative educatoinal years, homework is assigned because it is an effective mechanism to have them practice the concepts being taught to them, and to do this outside of the structured classroom environment. This activity promotes the crystallization of learning objectives and prepares the student for the next lesson, which builds upon the previous.

After a student becomes largely self-sufficient, the homework model becomes less about enforcement through grading, and becomes more about preparing the student to manage their own academic development outside of the lectures and office hours. The student goes to class because they understand they NEED to be there to learn, unlike a child who must be TOLD to be there.

In this regard, whether or not homework is graded, and whether or not a student feels a need to cheat or take shortcuts with homework, is really just a reflection of the student's maturity and sense of responsibility for their own intellectual development. Typically, a professor should not need to police what a student does on their own time; what matters is the ability to certify that a student has met the learning objectives--and that is done through examination.

So, what I find disturbing is not the question of whether this professor should grade his students' homework, or whether the students are using AI to do their homework for them instead of actually learning the material. As the old adage goes, cheaters are only cheating themselves--at least, that's what I would still like to believe.

No, what I actually find most disturbing is this apparent disconnect in the professor's views on the future of AI as they pertain to professional mathematics, and the impact of AI use on the education of humanity. He predicts that AI will be better than professional human mathematicians, and I think this belies a deeply mistaken perspective on the purpose of learning and doing mathematics, one that I am extremely surprised that a working professional mathematician would make.

Even if AI models far exceed the human capacity to prove theorems, will it ever FEEL enjoyment and excitement about doing mathematics? Because if it can't stir something in you, then why do it, and why bother teaching it to others? Why would you ever need to teach another student, if you could just always ask a computer instead? In fact, why will anyone in the future ever need to learn anything, if AI will be the replacement for our brains?

I am a human being and I feel. I dream, and I love. I love mathematics, and it is not simply the result or the answer that I love, but the entire process. The struggle, the failure, the questioning and working away at it until at last, there is UNDERSTANDING. And the flaw that I see my fellow humans are making, over and over, is this crazy focus on RESULTS. ANSWERS. GOALS. They seem to have forgotten how to enjoy the process of doing things, whether it is the restoration of a classic car, or composing a musical score, or deciding what to cook for dinner.

I mean, why spend months and months on taking apart a 1957 Buick engine, lovingly cleaning every component, repairing and sometimes manufacturing replacements, and reassembling it? Why, when you can have a new electric car that is far safer and more efficient, with more functions and conveniences? Let me be clear; I don't work on classic cars or have any experience with automotive mechanics. But even from my outsider's perspective, I instantly know, at a visceral level, why they do it. It is for the love of the process; to take this machine and build it with your bare hands so that you have a complete understanding of it; and that this machine is an embodiment of engineering, aesthetics, and a symbolism of the freedom of movement.

That's what AI will not, and will never, do. It can't fall in love with the process, because to do so is what it means to love learning, and is part of what it means to be human. And for a professor of mathematics to not appreciate this is, to me, very misguided, and does not bode well for the education of future generations.

Who's going to be able to scrounge up an extra 12KB of RAM in today's market?

It looks like if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

You keep using that word in the narrow terms of a computer programmer who just finished a training course where they drilled in the technical meanings of "authorization" vs "authentication".

However, a news article for the general public is not constrained by that context. The dictionary says that "authorization" in general is permission to do something. If you prompt an AI to do one thing with your bank account, then you didn't give it permission to do something else entirely, even if it got the logon credentials to do so. It wasn't authorized by you to do the other thing.

Here's another example: It's wartime and you got drafted. Usually you're not allowed to kill people, but the government handed you a gun and you're now authorized to kill enemy soldiers. That doesn't mean that you can just shoot your comrade next to you in the trench. And you certainly can't make the claim "But I was authorized to shoot Corporal Smith. You gave me a gun, after all!"

Consider a human analogy: In many cases, people give financial advisors access to one or more of their accounts so that the advisor can make trades or other transactions for the benefit of their clients. However, if an advisor suddenly starts making transactions that do not benefit the clients or are contrary to their agreed instructions, then that activity is unauthorized, even if they have login credentials.

One other thing I forgot to mention. I'm skeptical that this "AI startup" actually did what it claimed to do, but since I have no evidence either way, I reserve my judgment until more details are given.

If the startup can't or won't provide evidence, that in itself is suggestive of some kind of fraudulent behavior meant to hype up the company, a la Theranos/Elizabeth Holmes. But in so far as the underlying scientific principles are involved, the strategy seems plausible. I just don't know if this company actually did it.

So I only remembered a little bit of the virology of phages from what I learned in school--namely, that they infect bacteria and that they are everywhere. And when I saw some of the early comments posted here that were big on knee-jerk reactions and scarcasm but small on actual science, I decided to read the Wikipedia article.

Phages don't infect eukaryotes; they only infect bacteria. And phage therapy has been successfully used to combat antibiotic resistance in humans, although the problem of resistance in general remains. This makes sense: bacteria replicate rapidly and have relatively little in the way of proofreading mechanisms, so when there is selection pressure, they mutate and develop resistance very easily, even to phages. So engineering a phage to target an antibiotic-resistant bacterial strain might work in the short term, but unless there's a way to cultivate phages that are able to adapt in response to (and not simply target) that strain, the strategy is intrinsically self-limiting.

To those comments drawing ill-informed comparisons to engineering viruses that infect humans, know this: phages are literally everywhere on this planet. They are far, far more abundant than bacteria, and most people can appreciate how ubiquitous bacteria are. You already have phages inside of you, and in fact, they form an entire ecosystem. Same thing with bacteria--you have bacteria all over and inside your body. You have more bacterial cells coexisting on and inside you than you have your own cells. And what's more interesting is that these phages seem to be protective by helping to maintain a balanced microbiome.

The concern I have with engineered phages is not that they would be harmful to the environment or to us, or that they could mutate to be harmful. That is extremely, extremely unlikely, because such a concern doesn't reflect an understanding of how phages actually function in real life and how they co-evolve with the bacteria they infect. If anything I would be concerned about spreading bacteria that become extensively resistant to antibiotics and phages. Thus we need better education about what phage therapy is, and to ensure that study participants are adequately informed of the potential risks and benefits. The direction such therapy would most likely need to take is quite similar to CRISPR and other gene therapies, in that it would need to be a form of personalized medicine. If we can develop computer models to help perform this personalization more efficiently, then I'm for it; such an approach may also prove useful for treating cancer.