Dozens of mathematicians signed a declaration Tuesday calling for the discipline to resist beating the drum for artificial intelligence developers.
The “Leiden Declaration”, backed by over 150 professors from across the world including Europe, Japan and the US, warned governments especially not to “believe the hype” about systems’ maths abilities.
Their intervention follows claims of increasing capability from AI firms, including performance in elite international competitions and alleged solutions to thorny open questions in the field.
AI “opens new and exciting opportunities, but it also raises questions that cannot be left unexamined,” International Mathematical Union (IMU) vice-president Ulrike Tillmann wrote in an endorsement.
“The future of mathematical research must be guided by human judgment, fair and transparent practices, and the shared values of the global mathematical community,” she added.
AI developers face “a strong commercial incentive… to overstate the capabilities of their products,” the declaration read.
Released “on market timelines” rather than at the pace of human-reviewed science, AI publicity can “misleadingly use specific mathematical tasks as metrics for the general reasoning capacities of commercial models”, it added.
With hundreds of billions of dollars in investor cash up for grabs, companies are scrambling to paint AI models in a glowing light.
“There is a competition to the death on the part of the main labs… they are trying, using mathematics… to attract investment so that each of them will be left standing,” Columbia University professorMichael Harris, one of the declaration’s co-authors, told AFP.
In recent days, both SpaceX — the Elon Musk-owned rocket firm which includes subsidiary xAI — and Anthropic have advanced towards stock market listings, while industry standard-bearer OpenAI is believed to be close behind.
Source: Insider Paper
