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Timothy Gowers @wtgowers
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Timothy Gowers @wtgowers

@wtgowers

Mathematician. Professeur titulaire de la chaire Combinatoire au Collège de France. Also fellow of Trinity College Cambridge.

  • Cambridge, England
  • Joined
194 Following60.2K Followers12.2K Posts
  1. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    Many people just starting out on Lean formalization have enjoyed playing the Natural Numbers Game. Now Autumn Mapes has produced Visual Lean, isomorphic to the original but playable in a lovely intuitive way with clicking and dragging rather than typing.
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  2. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    Posts @wtgowers
    This is just the beginning of a wider project -- I'm looking forward to seeing where it will go. More generally, I am (like many people) excited by the possibilities that imaginative interfaces will bring to mathematical reasoning.
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  3. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    Many people with relevant expertise think there's a real chance that AI could kill us all in the not too distant future. Others disagree. I've written a post, aimed principally at mathematicians, detailing my struggles to decide what to make of this.
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  4. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    Posts @wtgowers
    Tl;dr (and it is long): I don't have a p(doom), but in particular I can't confidently say that my p(doom) is close to zero, which is a worrying position to be in. I also try to encourage mathematicians to think harder about the question and maybe consider working on AI safety.
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  5. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    Posts @wtgowers
    Just seen this:
    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!
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  6. 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!
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  8. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    I realize @AcerFur is being ironic, but the popularity of the idea that AI "merely explores the convex hull" mystifies me. Why wouldn't it be more like the subgroup generated by existing mathematical knowledge? (That's also a metaphor -- I'm not saying there's a group structure.)
    Acer @AcerFur
    mathematicians should start saying "it's within the convex hull" instead of "it's trivial"
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  9. Acer@AcerFur
    mathematicians should start saying "it's within the convex hull" instead of "it's trivial"
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  10. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    More gallows humour
    Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi @NicoloCB
    My dream had always been to prove beautiful theorems as the AI agents unloaded my dishwasher. Well, it went the wrong way... 😂
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  11. Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi@NicoloCB
    My dream had always been to prove beautiful theorems as the AI agents unloaded my dishwasher. Well, it went the wrong way... 😂
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  12. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    George Monbiot on the insanity of building a third runway at Heathrow.
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  13. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    Another interesting perspective, from someone whose predictions about maths and AI have aged better than pretty well everyone else's.
    Christian Szegedy @ChrSzegedy
    Reading all those recent beautiful essays by Terry Tao, Kevin Buzzard and @wtgowers, I could not resist, but write up my deeply personal perspective on how I perceive and see things:
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  14. Christian Szegedy✓@ChrSzegedy
    Reading all those recent beautiful essays by Terry Tao, Kevin Buzzard and @wtgowers, I could not resist, but write up my deeply personal perspective on how I perceive and see things:
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  15. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    An interesting perspective (as one would expect) from Kevin Buzzard.
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  16. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    Timothy Gowers @wtgowers
    RT @DynamicsSIAM: "What math means to me" (by Larry Guth): "This is a personal essay about how I see math, what I value about it, and what it means to me."
    0620134
  17. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    Timothy Gowers @wtgowers
    RT @natemook: Horrific scenes out of Kyiv this morning as Russia used a jet-powered drone to blow up Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences. People are escaping through windows as the building burns. Just like they target kindergartens and schools, now they are bombing science.
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  18. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    Timothy Gowers @wtgowers
    RT @dsavitt: Hello, world! There is a new repository for works in math and TCS: now in public beta. Please try it out and submit something! We welcome your feedback while we build and improve it.
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  19. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    The advisory group on mathematics and artificial intelligence has just published a set of recommendations concerning the responsible release of mathematical results generated by AI companies using internal models. 1/3
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  20. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    Posts @wtgowers
    One of our main recommendations is that such results should be posted as quickly as possible, where that means as soon as certain minimum standards have been met, as outlined in particular in Section 2 of the recommendations. 2/3
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  21. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    Posts @wtgowers
    We took carefully into account feedback from over 600 mathematicians. Of course, they expressed a range of views, but I think that on each specific issue the majority view (of those who expressed a view) was well aligned with the prevailing view on the committee. 3/3
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  22. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    It's interesting to think about how much, if at all, the positive sentiments expressed here are appropriate to mathematicians. His main reason for optimism comes at the end: that now that "chiselling code by hand" is no longer necessary, "we can build amazing things". 1/3
    Scott @scottstts
    My god this is such a good speech that every SWE needs to hear. You know what? Every person should hear it Keep the happy memories, eyes on the reality, be excited about the future. That’s the best that anyone can do
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  23. Scott✓@scottstts
    My god this is such a good speech that every SWE needs to hear. You know what? Every person should hear it Keep the happy memories, eyes on the reality, be excited about the future. That’s the best that anyone can do
    Download
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  24. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    Posts @wtgowers
    Maybe the key for mathematics is whether we'll be able to do the mathematical equivalent of building amazing things -- exploring and systematizing incredible domains with AI saving us from the "chiselling" that has hitherto made such exploration a long and arduous process. 2/3
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  25. Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
    Posts @wtgowers
    I think it's not obvious to what extent the analogy works, since to enjoy an amazing piece of software it isn't necessary to understand it, but it feels as though enjoying an amazing piece of mathematics is pretty much the same thing as understanding it. 3/3
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