Why I agreed to join AGMAI

[This is a guest post by Martin Hairer, cross-posted from Proofs and Prompts. — T.] There has been a lot of speculation regarding the “Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artifical Intelligence” agmai.org since it was announced on Monday. In this short blog post, I would like to explain in a bit more detail how the group works, what we are trying to achieve, and why I agreed to be part of this group. First of all, let me lay down some facts that seem to have been drowned in a torrent of misinformation. The most important one is that we are genuinely independent of OpenAI and any other of the so-called `frontier’ AI labs. Yes, the original impetus of forming this group was OpenAI’s response to the statement A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics, but not all members of the group were contacted by OpenAI in the first place, there is nobody besides the nine of us taking part in our conversations, we do not receive any monetary compensation, and our technical support (so far mainly…