John Carlos Baez on Nostr: Marco Gualtieri writes: "The exploitation of mathematics by commercial AI labs comes ...

Marco Gualtieri (npub1juz…njnt) writes:

"The exploitation of mathematics by commercial AI labs comes as no surprise. Mathematics enables the creation of powerful controllable systems across diverse domains—including cryptography, weapons technology, financial arbitrage, and advanced algorithms such as the LLM. The subject has a reputation for unassailable precision and verifiable correctness. Thus, the use of funding by large companies and venture capitalists to pull mathematicians into their orbit for private gain. The framing by the AI companies of the LLM as a potentially dangerous quasi-sentient entity, besides being arguably true, is a useful marketing strategy, an attempt to gather for themselves the social and economic capital that is usually reserved for basic scientific research. The problem of “alignment” or “AI safety” is not one that we should expect to be solved by companies that are essentially military cyberwarfare facilities built by unlimited debt financing."

This is the kind of thing more mathematicians - like me - should be saying.

The problem is that LLMs are really powerful and useful in math, unlike many areas. So unlike many people, we can't honestly say "AI is useless for my work, it's a trick pulled by big companies to extract capital from everyone else, they will happily ruin my profession, and data centers are terrible for the environment." If we're completely honest we have to say "AI is great for my work, but it's a trick pulled by big companies to extract capital from everyone else, they will happily ruin my profession, and data centers are terrible for the environment." This is uncomfortable.

Gualtieri suggests some things to do....

(1/n)

https://www.math.toronto.edu/mgualt/math-blog/posts/math-and-llm-2026/