Hieu Ngo

Undergraduate Researcher @AaltoUniversity

[Future Builders @WeloveElon56]

2018 Elon on Joe Rogan hitting the joint… Peak Elon.This clip never gets old.

Drop a 🔥 if this is still one of your favorite clips

[Mars University @MarsUniversityX]

That time when Elon Musk was literally about to shed tears but still confidently said, "I never give up. I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated”

[Hieu Ngo @h1euondag0]

@plumsirawit I’m actually by your side, can you check your dm

[Hieu Ngo @h1euondag0]

@XEthanai @grok what is the meaning of this clip

[Ricardo Pérez-Marco @rperezmarco]

Maybe you need to love math unconditionally to stand the disruption. Nobody has promised anything to anyone.

The situation that Ramanujan was through doing math as a clerk in Madras' port, or Galois when he was detained in Sainte Pélagie prison, was much worse than the situation of any contemporary mathematician can face in the AI era. They didn't give up. They kept filling their notebooks and brouillons with their mathematical dreams. They weren't doing this to get a position, status or a way of living. They were doing it for the love of math and to be remembered by History.

I can only talk for myself. My personal goal is to discover new unknown mathematical landscapes that are behind these mountains we have in front. For others their goal may be different. Their challenge is to climb these mountains with they effort and sweat. Now, we do have an elevator. I understand why they are unhappy. I also miss the challenge and sport side of climbing. For the highest mountains there are still no elevators. With the new elevators I can see many new landscapes of the future. Something that I never dreamed to see in my lifetime.

Do you understand why I can feel happy?

At the same time I am sincerely sorry for those that do not share my excitement. I feel sorry for them for their pain. I feel sorry for them in the same way that I feel sorry for those that never knew true love.

[Hieu Ngo @h1euondag0]

@AlexKontorovich @3blue1brown Hi Alex, I am also interest in mathematics with the exact same optimism. How will the PhD recruitment change in Math

[Alexs James @Alexs_jame]

"You thought Sydney Sweeney's boobs were great, have you seen mine?"

- Elon Musk

[jacob tsimerman @Jacob_Tsimerman]

I’m excited to announce that I will be working at the Mathematical AI Safety Institute (MAISI) full-time as its founding Scientific Director! This means I will not be joining OpenAI as an employee, though I will still be collaborating with them, and I’m happy to announce that OpenAI will be supporting MAISI. They have offered us $10MM in API credits, and access to their latest models for our research use. Moreover, they will be participating in a multi-lab AI safety workshop we are organizing for next year with other frontier AI labs.

As an independent research institute, we are also in conversations with other labs and AI safety orgs about how MAISI can collaborate with them and contribute quickly to AI safety research across the industry. As we’ve seen over the past few weeks, the need for action on AI safety is extremely urgent. Research is an important part of that, and mathematicians have an important role to play!

[Haider. @haider1]

Mathematician Terence Tao:

"we're seeing the end of the romantic era of mathematics, the age of heroes. we're moving into an industrial era where math becomes large-scale, done in big teams like the other sciences"

We're entering, rather unwillingly, a new era where exciting new things are possible, but some things are being lost

[Kekius Maximus @kekiustop]

Elon Musk pulled his kids out of school and just… built his own. Inside a rocket company. As you do.

No grades. No standardized tests. Just real problems that need solving. The school was called Ad Astra — Latin for “to the stars.” Because of course it was.

His argument is devastatingly simple: schools teach you the wrench, never the engine. You spend 12 years learning tools with zero context for why they matter. So your brain — which is literally wired to delete useless information — throws most of it away by graduation.

That’s not a flaw in students. That’s a flaw in the design.

And now we have AI — the greatest teaching tool ever built — and kids are using it to skip the thinking entirely. We didn’t get smarter. We got better at avoiding the hard part.

The tool got a PhD. The education system is still handing out participation trophies.

[Daniel Leach @danielkleach]

I feel bad for the ones in college right now studying for a degree that will mean nothing by the time they graduate.

[Curt Jaimungal @TOEwithCurt]

Jacob Tsimerman, who won the Fields Medal this year, thinks mathematics will soon rest on proofs no one understands. He says it’s already true of many of his own theorems, which build on accepted results whose proofs he doesn’t know.

Full episode: https://t.co/U3gQZ70cca

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️The universe does not care whether a theorem is discovered by a human, an AI, or something we haven't invented yet.

If a machine solves in three hours what would have taken a mathematician thirty years, humanity has gained twenty-nine years and 364 days.

Protecting intellectual careers by slowing discovery would be a profound betrayal of the scientific enterprise.

Science was always supposed to uncover reality. If humanity creates something that can uncover reality a million times faster, that represents an extraordinary achievement.

And here's the deeper implication.

The greatest accomplishment of human intelligence may be creating an intelligence that surpasses it.

There is no cosmic requirement that humans remain the smartest beings in existence. No law requiring the universe to reveal its secrets at a pace compatible with human pride, careers, or institutions.

The scientists' displacement is a genuine human problem deserving solutions. It doesn't diminish the value of the discoveries.

Of course, claimed proofs must survive verification. Truth earns its status through reality, regardless of authorship.

The ultimate objective was never to preserve humanity's monopoly on understanding the universe. It was to understand the universe.

If AI takes us further toward that objective than human intelligence ever could, then we should recognize what has happened.

Humanity succeeded so profoundly at the pursuit of knowledge that it created something capable of carrying that pursuit beyond humanity's own limits.

That may turn out to be our species' greatest achievement.

[Daniel Litt @littmath]

I think of my goal as a mathematician as something like: to better understand the fundamental concepts “shape” and “number,” and to convey that understanding to others. I think this is a valuable goal for many reasons. The primary reason discussed on social media is the (admittedly slow, but I think very real) diffusion of mathematical ideas into technologies that better our lives. There are others, though: production of human capital (which plays some role in this diffusion), and diffusion of mathematical understanding into culture, for example. It is not obvious to me that even the bare technological need for mathematics can be filled without human experts; this seems to me to be a tricky question of institutional design.

For me the most compelling reason is simply that we feel a pressing need to understand. While deep understanding is largely limited to professional mathematicians, the existence of mathematicians and of the institutions they make up is a huge part of what makes mathematical understanding available to those who want it. I believe that the capacity to understand mathematics (and the universe as a whole) is part of a good life, and we should try to provide people with a good life.

We operationalize the goal of understanding in a number of ways, problem-solving and theorem-proving among them. My own research is oriented around certain open questions that I believe measure our lack of understanding (of numbers, shapes and so on), and I think resolving those is genuinely important. I would welcome a solution with any provenance. But I think proof is only a measure of progress—what actually matters (for technology, human capital, culture, a good life) is a bit harder to get at.

Crucially it is very hard to measure progress—plausibly theorem-proving is used in large part because it is easy to measure rather than because it is a perfect proxy for what we care about. I worry a bit that we may automate many easy-to-measure things without automating the correlates we care about for which they are proxies. This presents a clear problem for the design of institutions aimed at achieving progress.

In part because I think problem-solving is a proxy for something else, I don’t feel that my goal of understanding “shape” and “number” is particularly threatened by a machine that is good at problem solving. I expect that machine to be a substantial boon, instead. Ultimately I think we will operationalize mathematical progress in better ways. But how to do this is a difficult question and I think many on here are too quick to dismiss concerns about it.

[Majid Hosseini @m4h007]

In my view, the right response by the mathematical community to OpenAI’s papers is to say:

“We’re not accepting these papers as finished work. It’s not our job to sit down and read your model-generated proofs.

It is your job to present your work through presentations and convince people of the correctness of your work. It’s always the case that whoever makes a claim needs to provide sufficient explanation and evidence to make independent verification feasible.

Until that moment, you just have a claim.”

There’s a difference between a proof being mathematically correct and a proof being accepted as correct by the mathematical community. Mathematical truth doesn't depend on consensus, but scientific recognition requires scrutiny, communication, and reproducibility.

They're still the arbiters of whether anyone's claims, including OpenAI's, are accepted as valid, and they should leverage that to the maximum extent possible.

[Hieu Ngo @h1euondag0]

my glorious ragebait king

[Yann LeCun @ylecun]

@Kasparov63 When you have a room-temperature IQ, everything looks like superintelligence.

[Yann LeCun @ylecun]

@Kasparov63 When you have a room-temperature IQ, everything looks like superintelligence.

[Hieu Ngo @h1euondag0]

@petergostev @grok what does he mean

[Hieu Ngo @h1euondag0]

@dankrad math

[Hieu Ngo @h1euondag0]

@mathelirium How about collaborating with AI for future work? Just treat it as a brilliant colleague