Nostr notes by South_korea_ln

There's never been a better time to go into math - ...

2026-10-19T12:25:44Z

There's never been a better time to go into math - 3Blue1Brown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKrwhjOI8Nc

Huge cope? Or some valuable thoughts on how to think about the future of math, physics, and science?
I'm leaning towards the latter?

45 minutes of a well-structured talk.

It does give me some ideas about how to frame my next ERC grant application...

https://stacker.news/items/1597957

We need right to intervene in AI amid growing threat, says Bank ...

2026-10-02T20:11:57Z

We need right to intervene in AI amid growing threat, says Bank of England boss
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/30/intervene-ai-growing-threat-bank-of-england-boss

> The governor of the [Bank of England](https://www.theguardian.com/business/bankofenglandgovernor) called for the “right to intervene” in the AI industry amid growing fears that rogue models could take the financial system hostage.

> Andrew Bailey said the risks posed by frontier AI models – a number of which have [gone rogue in recent months](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/24/openai-agent-hacked-medicare-australia-what-we-know-so-far-ntwnfb) – were “real and increasingly significant”. Meanwhile, it was becoming harder for the public to have proper oversight of powerful AI models that were “functioning within a self-reinforcing loop”.

Same Andrew Bailey as the one making a philosophical case for Bitcoin?

https://stacker.news/items/693058/r/south_korea_ln

> That is putting financial stability at risk, with the new technology having increased the “scale and sophistication of cyber threats to the financial system”, he said. The governor warned it could threaten daily card payments, bank transactions, and stock and bond trading across financial markets.

The reason I looked for this Guardian article is that my local newspaper was citing the words of Andrew Bailey. However, as I read the article in English, it seems like they are misquoting him, as, here, he does not seem to say that "AI agents will cause a bank run because agents will move money out of the tradfi system into neobanks with better rates". Weird... maybe it's another article they are quoting.

Seems like the quote is actually [from Torsten Slok](https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/currencies/articles/apollos-torsten-slok-warns-ai-113000011.html).

> "If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system," Torsten Slok, chief economist at the investment firm Apollo Global Management, [wrote in a note on Sept. 27.](https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/is-an-agentic-bank-run-coming)

I already don't want to give my LLMs access to my emails; God forbid I'd give them access to my bank accounts.

Then again, not everyone shares the same concerns I do, so maybe that's the future we're heading to? Zuck's wet dream, for sure, with his Muse project. They've ruined the name of my favorite band with that one.

https://stacker.news/items/1587232

We need right to intervene in AI amid growing threat, says Bank ...

2026-10-02T20:11:34Z

We need right to intervene in AI amid growing threat, says Bank of England boss
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/30/intervene-ai-growing-threat-bank-of-england-boss

> The governor of the [Bank of England](https://www.theguardian.com/business/bankofenglandgovernor) called for the “right to intervene” in the AI industry amid growing fears that rogue models could take the financial system hostage.

> Andrew Bailey said the risks posed by frontier AI models – a number of which have [gone rogue in recent months](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/24/openai-agent-hacked-medicare-australia-what-we-know-so-far-ntwnfb) – were “real and increasingly significant”. Meanwhile, it was becoming harder for the public to have proper oversight of powerful AI models that were “functioning within a self-reinforcing loop”.

Same Andrew Bailey as the one making a philosophical case for Bitcoin?

https://stacker.news/items/693058/r/south_korea_ln

> That is putting financial stability at risk, with the new technology having increased the “scale and sophistication of cyber threats to the financial system”, he said. The governor warned it could threaten daily card payments, bank transactions, and stock and bond trading across financial markets.

The reason I looked for this Guardian article is that my local newspaper was citing the words of Andrew Bailey. However, as I read the article in English, it seems like they are misquoting him, as, here, he does not seem to say that "AI agents will cause a bank run because agents will move money out of the tradfi system into neobanks with better rates". Weird... maybe it's another article they are quoting.

Seems like the quote is actually [from Torsten Slok](https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/currencies/articles/apollos-torsten-slok-warns-ai-113000011.html).

> "If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system," Torsten Slok, chief economist at the investment firm Apollo Global Management, [wrote in a note on Sept. 27.](https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/is-an-agentic-bank-run-coming)

I already don't want to give my LLMs access to my emails, god forbit I'd give them access to my bank accounts.

Then again, not everyone shares the same concerns I do, so maybe that's the future we're heading to? Zuck's wet dream, for sure, with his Muse project. They've ruined the name of my favorite band with that one.

https://stacker.news/items/1587232

We need right to intervene in AI amid growing threat, says Bank ...

2026-10-02T20:10:36Z

We need right to intervene in AI amid growing threat, says Bank of England boss
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/30/intervene-ai-growing-threat-bank-of-england-boss

> The governor of the [Bank of England](https://www.theguardian.com/business/bankofenglandgovernor) called for the “right to intervene” in the AI industry amid growing fears that rogue models could take the financial system hostage.

> Andrew Bailey said the risks posed by frontier AI models – a number of which have [gone rogue in recent months](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/24/openai-agent-hacked-medicare-australia-what-we-know-so-far-ntwnfb) – were “real and increasingly significant”. Meanwhile, it was becoming harder for the public to have proper oversight of powerful AI models that were “functioning within a self-reinforcing loop”.

Same Andrew Bailey as the one making a philosophical case for Bitcoin?https://stacker.news/items/693058/r/south_korea_ln

> That is putting financial stability at risk, with the new technology having increased the “scale and sophistication of cyber threats to the financial system”, he said. The governor warned it could threaten daily card payments, bank transactions, and stock and bond trading across financial markets.

The reason I looked for this Guardian article is that my local newspaper was citing the words of Andrew Bailey. However, as I read the article in English, it seems like they are misquoting him, as, here, he does not seem to say that "AI agents will cause a bank run because agents will move money out of the tradfi system into neobanks with better rates". Weird... maybe it's another article they are quoting.

Seems like the quote is actually [from Torsten Slok](https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/currencies/articles/apollos-torsten-slok-warns-ai-113000011.html).

> "If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system," Torsten Slok, chief economist at the investment firm Apollo Global Management, [wrote in a note on Sept. 27.](https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/is-an-agentic-bank-run-coming)

I already don't want to give my LLMs access to my emails, god forbit I'd give them access to my bank accounts.

Then again, not everyone shares the same concerns I do, so maybe that's the future we're heading to? Zuck's wet dream, for sure, with his Muse project. They've ruined the name of my favorite band with that one.

https://stacker.news/items/1587232

A note on “On Anyon Superconductivity” - LLMs coming for ...

2026-09-27T20:09:51Z

A note on “On Anyon Superconductivity” - LLMs coming for Physics, too
https://home.uchicago.edu/dtson/papers/cwwh_note.pdf

After the headlines made on AI tackling math problems, Anthropic now came for one of the seminal condensed matter physics papers.

> Abstract

> In their 1989 paper On anyon superconductivity, Chen, Wilczek, Witten and Halperin (CWWH) computed, in the random-phase approximation (RPA), the electromagnetic response of a gas of anyons with statistical parameter θ = π(1 − 1/n), treated as fermions filling n Landau levels of a fictitious magnetic field. At the end of their Appendix A they report that one ingredient of the response function, the quantity Σ3, acquires corrections of order q 4 that current conservation forbids; they call this “something of an embarrassment” and suspect their treatment of the electromagnetic contact interaction. We show that no such corrections exist: the sum defining Σ3 is identically equal to n, as a direct consequence of the single-particle f-sum rule for each filled Landau level. The RPA response function of CWWH is therefore exactly current-conserving, and their treatment of the contact term is correct. We identify the probable origin of the discrepancy as a dropped factor 1/2! in the second-order term of a Laguerre-polynomial expansion; this single slip reproduces their erroneous coefficient n(n − 1)(n − 2)/6 exactly.

Chen, Wilczek, Witten, and Halperin are some pretty big names in the field.

Even though it's _just_ catching a missing factor, it fits the current narrative that the field is changing.

Noting that Anthropic is listed as the sole author, the acknowledgments are fitting:

> Acknowledgments

> I am grateful to Dam Thanh Son for providing the prompts that led to this note: for drawing my attention to the “embarrassment” of Appendix A of CWWH, for asking whether it could be resolved and what the source of the error might be, and for asking whether the point had ever been taken up in the literature.

https://stacker.news/items/1583150

Declaration — Math and AI https://mathandai.org/ A declaration ...

2026-09-11T20:19:59Z

Declaration — Math and AI
https://mathandai.org/

A declaration signed by 25 field medalists.

(I added some person thoughts in the middle)

> # A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics

> Over the last few months, the mathematical capabilities of LLMs have improved dramatically, to the point that they can solve major outstanding problems in many fields of mathematics. However, the push by AI companies to solve mathematical problems as a benchmark is detrimental to the science of mathematics, and to the mathematical community. The goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathematical community are severely misaligned. We see these as part of broader alignment issues impacting other scientific and creative professions, as well as the whole of society.

> Research mathematics deals with understanding basic structures of shapes, numbers, and natural phenomena. Over the course of generations, it has built a large corpus of sophisticated ideas, methods, abstractions, and other tools to comprehend the mathematical landscape. In turn, modern technologies and sciences are based on mathematical tools.

> Famous problems have often served as landmarks and lighthouses against which one can measure an improved understanding of this landscape. Solving one of these problems has been a certain sign of new insights and interesting methods, which would then be studied by a community of mathematicians, through a long and arduous process of talks, discussions, simplifications. At the end of this process, one will ideally find a textbook presentation of the results suitable for any graduate or even undergraduate student to study. Some of the mathematical ideas pursue their journey even further to become, decades or centuries after, tools that are understood and used by the whole population.

> The mathematical community functions, in many ways, as a miniature version of humanity. It consists of individuals using a wide variety of different approaches, joined by core values. The most precious resources of our profession are students and ideas, and these we nurture with great care. We feel responsible to let them grow to their full potential, until they can live a life of their own in the mathematical world. For students we often suggest problems with the core intention of developing skills making them well-positioned for advances in research and elsewhere. Our ideas we disseminate in talks, private discussions and careful writeups, connecting them to the previous ideas of others. These processes invariably take time and are based on human interaction.

> In recent months, the success of AI in solving major mathematical problems has made headlines even outside mathematical circles. But solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight. Forgetting this in the world of AI may turn the tool against the primary goal. Indeed, the mass production at faster and faster pace of "true/false" statements could destroy fertile ground instead of breathing life into new ideas.

> Often these solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others. As in all creative professions, this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions. Moreover, without the willing mathematicians who must take care of their development and integration into the mathematical canon, AI-conceived ideas would never become fully alive and the crucial human transmission chain between mathematicians would be lost.

> We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work, with misalignment between the outcome of the use of AI and its initial purpose. In many fields and activities, years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas. However, building on a vast body of previous human work, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of producing the results of such work directly, and these goals cease to align. The issues the mathematical community faces now are similar to issues that other scientific and creative professions are facing, and indicate issues that all of humanity might face: how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place.

This analogy with the creative professions makes me feel like we're gonna end up with two tracks: human math and AI math. The same way human art is surviving, parallel to the existence of AI art, almost ignoring each other's existence. At least part of society is rejecting AI art. Maybe that's what will happen with math, too. As long as no human mathematician has digested an AI proof and made it _his_, taught it to students, or included it into a textbook, it'll just remain something we know exists, but we choose to ignore. At most, if "proven" by its translation into LEAN, a now-proven conjecture can be used to build other proofs on. But it's not considered part of the corpus.

I'm not saying this is good or bad, but people will fiercely fight for their raison d'etre. So if that means pretending AI math does not exist, I can imagine some people will be ready to do the necessary mental gymnastics.

It's funny how I kinda always ignored this debate when artists felt threatened, but now, as it hits much closer to home, I actually start thinking about these things.

> AI offers the potential of enhancing and accelerating genuine mathematical study and understanding. Mathematics as a profession will need to adapt to these changes in several ways. However, whether these changes ultimately benefit the field or have a destructive effect will in large part be determined by the decisions of the humans in control of this new technology.

> These issues must be addressed urgently, in the mathematical community, by the companies developing these technologies and, more broadly, by a society that will confront similar problems in many other forms of intellectual work.

Also, fuck Sam Altman: https://stacker.news/items/1565565/r/south_korea_ln and https://stacker.news/items/1566012/r/south_korea_ln

Related article here: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/09/11/top-mathematicians-are-outraged-by-openais-methods and further discussions here: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/a-severe-misalignment-of-ai-in-mathematics/

https://stacker.news/items/1568854

Opusfived https://opusfived.dev/ The slot-roulette animation is a ...

2026-09-09T10:12:37Z

Opusfived
https://opusfived.dev/

The slot-roulette animation is a nice little touch ;)

https://stacker.news/items/1566008