➡️“Technologies which affect the way in which mathematics is practiced may disturb the current system of incentives. The use of artificial intelligence — and thus also the sort of problems which it can address — may become incentivized for its own sake, disrupting our mechanisms for hiring, funding, and recognition.”
“Proper evaluation is endangered if results are communicated through informal channels such as press releases or blog posts, often without any research paper or other disclosure of information necessary for scientific evaluation. This practice seeks publicity for new results on market timelines before the accepted processes of community evaluation in mathematics can take place....
In many cases this leads to simplifications in reporting, such as overemphasizing the significance of automated tools and undervaluing the prior human contributions which have made those tools possible. Such oversimplification risks influencing public opinion in a way that not only damages perceptions of mathematics, but also misleadingly uses specific mathematical tasks as metrics for the general reasoning capacities of commercial products.”
"The increasing involvement of technology companies in mathematical research raises the risk that research questions may come to be prioritized because of their amenability to automated mathematics, rather than expert judgment of their deeper significance"
Also, recommendations like:
"Some automated tools and their developers will align with the provisions of this Declaration, while others will not. Consider this when deciding which tools to use, or whether to use them at all."
And "Also consider whether non-proprietary, energy-efficient, or small-scale systems suffice for your task. If not, consider how preservation of the values articulated in this Declaration may be worth a delay in obtaining results."
Jul 21, 2026, 3:44 PM@timnitGebru@dair-community.social That's such an excellent statement and is kind of the reason I don't do much HPC anymore (and not professionally).
Large scale computing is always a devil's bargain, but I considered it worthwhile for computational chemistry and physics. But as I went from the academic side to the professional side, it became obvious how even in the 'traditional', pre-LLM computing world, only a small percentage of the computing resources were allocated to research. There was already a lot of waste (oil and gas simulations, etc). And in the current computing paradigm, it is so much worse...
From the declaration, I also really liked:
As mathematicians, and also as inhabitants of a shared world, we have a duty to care for other people and our environment.It's so simple, but also such a fresh breath of air after coming up against "we only care about the technology in this project" so often.
Jul 21, 2026, 3:51 PM@aud @timnitGebru this is so important, and points to the uneven allocation of *all* resources, not just computing resources.
The kind of budgeting that I do now in academia (social sciences) is laughable compared to the budgeting I did when I worked in tech.
And most of the big budgets and excessive resources are just waste...
@aud such a simple statement that I"m surprised to see from academics writing a declaration in a STEM field. What does that say smh.
@aud @timnitGebru there are some lovely counter-examples, though. I can offer one from my career: I briefly worked for a company that does analog semiconductor design (for cell phone front-end filters) in silico. Their work directly replaces (polluting) fabrication turns, which were previously the only way to evaluate performance for those filters. But when the compute got good enough and big enough, the simulations became comparably useful.