AI, Society and The Fight of Mathematicians

For the past few years, creatives, especially writers and artists, have been battling with AI companies about the wanton theft of their intellectual property without attribution, compensation, or even permission before using their work to train AI models. It’s been the classic land-grab where the bigger actor takes all you have and dares you to do your worst, because they know you can only cry.

This week, OpenAI announced that it solved a Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem, a mathematical equation that governs the flow of fluids. The way that OpenAI went about solving the problem has caused a ruckus among mathematicians who allege that OpenAI stole data from their chat logs on Codex. 

And now, it’s the turn of the Mathematics community to fight back. They signed an open letter calling for a more guided approach to human-machine collaboration in solving mathematical problems, with special attention to how it benefits society. Before then, OpenAI cancelled its sponsorship of a Mathematical marathon event hosted by Caltech. The irony is that in the tweet announcing their withdrawal of support, they mentioned “considering concerns raised by members of the mathematics community ”. Meanwhile, this event is an event to foster more collaboration between AI companies and mathematicians.

For what it’s worth, the Maths community seems more coordinated, and their approach to the fight has more vim. 

It is important that these fights against tech oligopoly and the fears of their projected long-term effects on society, democracy and human rights continue in order to balance how we define humanity in the coming years.

Talking about humanity, this same week, Google posted about AlphaGenome Atlas which they describe as the most comprehensive catalogue of how genetic mutations affect molecular biology. Like AlphaFold, their database of  protein structures, which has aided research on drug discovery and design, AlphaGenome is a database that predicts the effects of every possible single nucleotide variant in the human genome. 

The science of human DNA is rife with mysteries and ethical concerns.  It’ll be interesting to see what new frontiers this latest technological contribution opens.