Hacker News
points by sdenton4 10 hours ago | 0 comments
"If you just waited a year, would some other AI produce that same proof independently?"

I had a conversation about this very problem last November, with a visiting mathematician. It's essentially signaling a deflationary spiral in intellectual work: why bother doing the work now, when it will take half as much effort a year from now?

This is perhaps always a possible stance, but it's exacerbated when some proportion of your own agency is handed over to, well, agents.

[–] augment_me 9 hours ago
This might hold up for theoretical intellectual work without any economical value, but if you are researching anything that can be applied to the industry, you will instead have 1 year of market ownership and first-mover advantage.

I think it says more about what the value of math as intellectual work is, than about intellectual work in general.

Like if an Egyptian historian would come and say "let's wait one year until the methods are good enough to decrypt this language", no one would be bothered or surprised.

[–] Loquebantur 8 hours ago
You imply "worth" being equal to some known economic value.

You even imply, economic value was determined correctly in advance for arbitrarily long future intervals. And the applicability was known in advance to begin with.

Obviously, you're completely wrong.

Applying simplistic models to real life incurs a penalty. The affected scale multiplies with that penalty. When dealing with things affecting humanity as a whole, that makes careless over-generalizations a serious hazard.

[–] doc_ick 9 hours ago
“if you are researching anything that can be applied to the industry, you will instead have 1 year of market ownership and first-mover advantage.”

I would like to disagree with you on that point. Given the very popular rise of https://rea.tools/, it appears the time to reverse engineer anything software based (up to maybe 80% or more?) could be down to minutes. With a recent example, some indie video game developers are not going to show off their video game until release as a few have been flipped and made it to market before the original developers have. Point being, a few moths of market ownership could be possible if llms can’t reverse it in any way.

[–] FeteCommuniste 7 hours ago
What a waste. All the anticipation that used to be built up with previews and looks into the dev process, now flushed down the toilet so billionaires can flood the web with crap and make more billions.
[–] ignoramous 9 hours ago
Someone is going to make the case against using LLMs to reverse engineer software solely for commercial gain being as illegal as using guns for extortion.
[–] doc_ick 7 hours ago
Unless you’re able to get a patent on day one, once an idea is public potentially within the hour someone can make more money off of it and it’s not just your idea. Seems like a valid case to lock it down.
[–] hn_throwaway_99 9 hours ago
First movers often lose though in the market. Relevant to today's news about DoorDash acquiring Instacart for a few billion dollars: WebVan came out a decade earlier (i.e. at the wrong time) and went bankrupt after 3 years.

A perhaps more relevant personal anecdote: About a year ago I told a non-technical friend that I'd help him migrate his small business website that was originally set up in WordPress (by a developer who is since long gone) to a format that would be much easier for him to manage with no dev support. I planned to move him over to one of the usual suspects like Wix or Squarespace, but this is one instance where my procrastination was a virtue. In the ~9 months since he originally had an issue with his site, AI capabilities had exploded. Turned out it was a lot easier (and cheaper) to use Claude to fully migrate his site and get it up on Cloudflare workers, and I set up everything so he could manage all the content himself. Plus, it took me less than a day to do the migration off WordPress, and most of that time was just me wanting to learn the ins and outs of Claude Code because I was new to it at the time.

[–] RealityVoid 9 hours ago
I like this observation very much. Intellectual deflationary spiral is exactly how it feels at the moment and we might end up in a worse place because of it.
[–] amelius 8 hours ago
Or in a better place, because we're not feeding the beast, so to speak.
[–] bananaflag 8 hours ago
This is exactly how I feel. I tell everyone around me who is churning AI papers that the whole thing is pointless.

In 1-2 years the AI will give an instant answer to most conjectures anyway.

[–] Loquebantur 8 hours ago
Who will know to ask the right questions?
[–] FeteCommuniste 7 hours ago
Other AIs, of course. AIs all the way down.