This is a special post for quick takes by t6aguirre. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Some notes on OpenAI disproving the Erdős unit distance conjecture (from a non-mathematician):
First, this is big. A notorious math conjecture being disproved by AI would be sci-fi 10 years ago. In my layman's read, this is plausibly the most prominent math result in the last 12 months -- AI, centaur, human or whatever.
Second, it rebutted an Erdős conjecture, and I found it curious that the first clear math breakthrough goes against consensus. There are a few potential reads to this: a) this seems to go against the LLMs-are-sycophantic-machine claims; b) even if LLMs are that sycophantic, exploring different intellectual paths is so cheap to them that sycophancy doesn't quite matter as much; c) it may mean that AI is sycophantic at the user-level but not at the literature-level, which actually may be great for finding novel solutions, but is also the very thing that enables e.g. AI psychosis.
Third, it's hard to wrap my head around having an intelligence that is probably at the level of a very promising Terence Tao graduate student -- but not Tao-level yet. It allows exploring many hypotheses/conjectures/counter-examples/constructions that go against intuitive human ~quick evaluation/priors of what is promising, simply because they can be so exhaustive in their exploration. It’s the country part of a “country of geniuses in a datacenter”
Fourth, the solution combines insights/techniques from different fields. It pulled off an answer that used algebraic number theory to solve a combinatorial geometry problem. Mathematicians seem to think how it did it may unlock more. In a world where specialization is deemed necessary structurally/institutionally, AIs have a special advantage even with "mere" cross-field interpolation [tbc, in this case there seems to be substantial extrapolation in my layman's read]. Also, the constraint here may not be human intelligence per se. Surely we don't have a current Riemann-level mathematician partly because of bottlenecks of human intelligence as things specialized, but also institutionally/organizationally we may have incentivized specialization too much besides what was intellectually important -- and organizational innovations may actually be the bottleneck for solving some big Millennium-level math problems [e.g. focused research organizations that allow for interdisciplinary moonshoots]
Fifth, we don't know much about how many other math problems OpenAI explored. Is this the first [prominent] one they got a solution to after running through all (relatively prominent) ~Erdős problems? I don't want to come across as moving goalposts -- again, this is really big. But what does it mean if they did an extensive evaluation of various problems and this particular one is the first one to land? My best sense right now is that they probably ran a search across various problems, had internal employees [that include very bright mathematicians] to verify what was most promising, then got Gowers/other prominent mathematicians involved to double-check. This may mean that various other problems have been solved but is currently bottleneck by expert human verification.
Lighting has been getting ridiculously cheaper. And for the most part we seem to be not taking advantage of that positive externality: reducing crime through better lighting. This has been battle-tested as one of the effective ways for public security, see Chalfin, Hansen, Lerner & Parker (2022), an RCT in NYC public housing finding ~36% reductions in nighttime outdoor index crimes from added street lighting. Many, many major cities still haven't copied this at the right levels!
But we're also getting substantially negative externalities of bright lighting. Office buildings that never turn off their lights because why would they care. Apropos the new office building that just opened next to my housing. This may alimentate NIMBY spirits in me, God forbid. Kyba et al. (2017) document that Earth's artificially lit outdoor area grew 2.2% per year from 2012 to 2016, with the LED transition producing a rebound effect instead of getting savings. Jevons paradox and such.
Also, this has all sorts of annoyances. I think malls, pharmacies, and hospitals have all become much brighter since my childhood. I may be more sensorially overloaded than most people, but this does meaningfully affect my qualia, so much that Pigou himself would collect taxes from the pharmacies with dozens and dozens of LEDs, while Coase would advocate that I have the natural property right of not being assaulted with that much lumen while buying a Tylenol. This does affect wellbeing of more than just me (Cho et al. 2015). But lightly enough, ha, to not be a topic of discussion.
Brazil has been dealing with massive criminal wildfires for the last few weeks, and the air quality is record-breakingly bad. Besides other obvious issues (ineffective government response in going after the criminals setting fires, climate change making everything worse), hardly anyone is talking about how to deal with the immediate air quality problem. It's a bit bizarre.
People aren't widely adopting PFF2 masks and air purifiers. These remain somewhat niche topics even though pretty much everyone is suffering. To be fair, there are occasional media reports and government alerts about how to deal with the situation, but these feel too little, and one only gets them if actively looking for them.
It's affecting tens of millions of people (scale ✓)
Barely anyone is really addressing it (neglectedness ✓)
We have simple solutions that could help a lot (tractability ✓)
It feels like there's potential for some serious impact if one approaches this right. It may be a severe case of availability bias, but all this is making me value air quality more as an EA cause area.
Thank you for writing this - I'm working on a post going over how much cheaper someone could make air purifiers for and it surprises me that it's not a more common topic of discussion. Some food for thought while I finish it up:
Indoor air quality affects so many people to at least some extent - consider air pollution, viruses, allergies etc.
Making air purifiers even slightly cheaper vastly increases the number of people globally who can afford one, and directly increases the cost effectiveness of any intervention which involves paying for them.
Noise is a common reason for people under-utilising air purifiers and the affordable end of consumer hardware hasn't solved for this yet. We know this because best-in-class clean air delivery rate (CADR) at a given noise level can be achieved with what is essentially a box with 2-4 air filters and some computer fans on the side (computer fans have become remarkably capable at low noise levels in recent times). These kits can be bought but minimal competition in the space means no one is anywhere close to the reasonable price floor.
Competition in the air purifier market has partially been on features which are not necessary when the goal is optimizing CADR/$. Ionization, timers, remote control, app connectivity, odour removal etc. can be done away with for the purpose of achieving "one billion air filters in this decade" or anything of similar scale.
It almost seems too simple: the many things floating around in the air cause a huge amount of death, illness and general discomfort. If you push enough air through a fine enough filter you remove the stuff in the air. If you make the filters cheap and quiet enough, people will be able to buy them and we can send people more of them for the same price.
Of course the air quality problem with respect to pollution is obviously something much more difficult to solve than simply chucking air filters everywhere since people also have to be outside for much of their day. 80,000 hours podcast 170 "Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths - and how to get that number down" is a great introduction. But regardless, people ought to be able to have some refuge somewhere, and indoor filtration and wearing a mask are the only ways is the only way someone can individually guarantee that for themselves.
There's a really cool start up I believe in India having integrated HEPA filtration in bike helmets. So many people there ride 2 wheelers and are stuck in abysmal air quality at least one or two hours every day.
Securitization in the international relations sense, that is, framing frontier AI development as a major (international/national) security threat that requires top cybersecurity, people with experience in the department of defense, etc.
Some notes on OpenAI disproving the Erdős unit distance conjecture (from a non-mathematician):
Lighting has been getting ridiculously cheaper. And for the most part we seem to be not taking advantage of that positive externality: reducing crime through better lighting. This has been battle-tested as one of the effective ways for public security, see Chalfin, Hansen, Lerner & Parker (2022), an RCT in NYC public housing finding ~36% reductions in nighttime outdoor index crimes from added street lighting. Many, many major cities still haven't copied this at the right levels!
But we're also getting substantially negative externalities of bright lighting. Office buildings that never turn off their lights because why would they care. Apropos the new office building that just opened next to my housing. This may alimentate NIMBY spirits in me, God forbid. Kyba et al. (2017) document that Earth's artificially lit outdoor area grew 2.2% per year from 2012 to 2016, with the LED transition producing a rebound effect instead of getting savings. Jevons paradox and such.
Also, this has all sorts of annoyances. I think malls, pharmacies, and hospitals have all become much brighter since my childhood. I may be more sensorially overloaded than most people, but this does meaningfully affect my qualia, so much that Pigou himself would collect taxes from the pharmacies with dozens and dozens of LEDs, while Coase would advocate that I have the natural property right of not being assaulted with that much lumen while buying a Tylenol. This does affect wellbeing of more than just me (Cho et al. 2015). But lightly enough, ha, to not be a topic of discussion.
Brazil has been dealing with massive criminal wildfires for the last few weeks, and the air quality is record-breakingly bad. Besides other obvious issues (ineffective government response in going after the criminals setting fires, climate change making everything worse), hardly anyone is talking about how to deal with the immediate air quality problem. It's a bit bizarre.
People aren't widely adopting PFF2 masks and air purifiers. These remain somewhat niche topics even though pretty much everyone is suffering. To be fair, there are occasional media reports and government alerts about how to deal with the situation, but these feel too little, and one only gets them if actively looking for them.
It feels like there's potential for some serious impact if one approaches this right. It may be a severe case of availability bias, but all this is making me value air quality more as an EA cause area.
Thank you for writing this - I'm working on a post going over how much cheaper someone could make air purifiers for and it surprises me that it's not a more common topic of discussion. Some food for thought while I finish it up:
It almost seems too simple: the many things floating around in the air cause a huge amount of death, illness and general discomfort. If you push enough air through a fine enough filter you remove the stuff in the air. If you make the filters cheap and quiet enough, people will be able to buy them and we can send people more of them for the same price.
Of course the air quality problem with respect to pollution is obviously something much more difficult to solve than simply chucking air filters everywhere since people also have to be outside for much of their day. 80,000 hours podcast 170 "Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths - and how to get that number down" is a great introduction. But regardless, people ought to be able to have some refuge somewhere, and indoor filtration and wearing a mask are the only ways
is the only waysomeone can individually guarantee that for themselves.There's a really cool start up I believe in India having integrated HEPA filtration in bike helmets. So many people there ride 2 wheelers and are stuck in abysmal air quality at least one or two hours every day.
Securitization is indeed coming
"OpenAI appoints Retired U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone to Board of Directors"
https://openai.com/index/openai-appoints-retired-us-army-general/
What do you mean by "securitization"?
Securitization in the international relations sense, that is, framing frontier AI development as a major (international/national) security threat that requires top cybersecurity, people with experience in the department of defense, etc.
ah, I was only familiar with the finance sense and my initial googling didn't turn up the IR sense at all, my bad