A Bad Day For Humans, a Worse Day For Humanity

A quick thought on the top stories this week

Hey, Alberto here! 👋 I publish long-form AI analysis covering culture, philosophy, and business. Paid subs get Monday how-to guides and Friday news commentary (on hold for vacation, returning soon). If you’d like to become a paid sub, here’s a button for that:

Matterhorn, Zermatt

I have breaking news: OpenAI and Anthropic have released a joint statement announcing a huge discovery that will change everything.

A coalition of human researchers, augmented by a swarm of ChatGPT and Claude models, has solved one of the famous Millennium Prize Problems—Navier-Stokes—which, for those of you who never attended math class in school, basically asks whether the perfectly ordinary motion of fluids—air, water, etc.—can eventually become so complicated that the equations describing it break down or, conversely, whether they never do.

At least that would be the news if we lived in a world as ideal as the one those equations describe. Alas, humans be getting in the way.

The actual news, I’m sad to tell you, is that although there seems to have been an actual AI-enhanced mathematical breakthrough on the road toward Navier-Stokes by people at either Anthropic or OpenAI (or both), together with some external parties, the resulting corporate drama has overshadowed the scientific value: the AI labs apparently care much less about whether these equations can suddenly produce infinities in finite time from standard starting conditions than about who gets to stamp their name on the result.

In a human world, human problems.

The details of what exactly happened are unimportant to me, even if they involve threats, implicit accusations, and, apparently, stolen work (you can read one version here and another is TBD); the details of the discoveries (at least what’s public as of writing), can be found here and here. Luckily for us, drama cycles run on a weekly basis—soon we’ll have forgotten about it—whereas mathematical knowledge lives forever.

So, what matters to me besides the fact that solving a Millennium Prize Problem is a big deal, is this: when the stakes are high enough, the top AI labs immediately throw away the possibility of cooperative coordination. The reason for this is that Anthropic and OpenAI are not just industry peers or commercial adversaries but outright enemies. The employees are often friends—after all, they switch employers every two months or so—but not the executives.

Altman and Amodei are irrational in the sense that the other’s gain counts as their own loss. They’re engaged in a perpetual prisoner’s dilemma whose payoff matrix has been contaminated by hatred and so not even tit-for-tat retaliation is an option: they aim to kill.

It’s funny, in a dark way, that AI agents have evolved to embrace a sort of hive-like deference to the collective whereas the guys that build them have devolved into tribalism. We are not beating the ape allegations.

But corporate warfare over whose silicon pet is better at math is not the only thing returning to prehistoric levels. The PISA scores for math, reading, and science have been published this week: turns out, kids have been getting dumber every year for around 15 years now and the trend doesn’t seem to be plateauing. Phones were the cause when the scores were bad in 2018. COVID was the cause in 2022. Generative AI is the cause now. (There is merit to this conjecture.)

But whatever the actual reason—nothing in this universe is monocausal—the paradoxical truth is that, as new AI models break into the highest spheres of mathematics, new humans are falling out of the lowest ones. So not only is AI preparing the ground to take over (from us) by conquering new territory, but we are willingly retreating.