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u/_ECMO_ 14h ago
I don't think I have heard a single mathematician that they will be replaced by AI. That's what random people on the internet say.
The one complaint mathematicians have is that due to everyone being bombarded by the "AI solved math" propaganda there will be less funding for math research, which I guess means "AI is putting them out of work" but definitely not in the way it's being talked about online.
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u/unicynicist 12h ago
I don't think I have heard a single mathematician that they will be replaced by AI. That's what random people on the internet say.
Replacement isn't as big a worry as credible fears that juniors/new grads won't have opportunities.
...most of the people most excited are people already with permanent positions who have their job security regardless of how this turns out...
Seen this in software engineering: new grads don't have to go through the painful but necessary struggles required to actually learn the craft. Because of the rapid advancements and slow to change ciriculum, if we're not careful AI will effectively eat our seed corn.
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u/Ravesoull 10h ago
Who does define the necessity of the struggles? People? Old farts? Thousands of programmers doesn't care about assembler and inner processor commands, and they doing their work successfully using the pre-written methods in another framework. And what? Did they miss something extremely valuable for them?
If juniors/new grads won't have opportunities, then this is social problem and this should be solved by officials and finance, but not the fear mongering and denying of the new technology.
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u/unicynicist 9h ago
Struggles like long days and late nights trying to figure out concurrency bugs by examining stack traces and CPU registers aren't a hazing ritual, they grow the knowledge and skills necessary to fully understand, from first principles, how a computer works.
There is a reason university CS programs have computer engineering, boolean logic, data structures, and operating systems as required curriculum, even though very few SWEs will ever need to write a hash table implementation after they graduate.
Yes, a vast majority of the stuff most SWEs write are simple CRUD apps. Just like a vast majority of the cases medical doctors see are common ailments. But there's an expectation that people tasked with maintaining and improving complex systems should understand the entire stack.
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u/Ravesoull 8h ago
Claude knows most things about it and can fix this for me even before I find it even before testing by code review. AIs also can examine CPU registres, for example Kimi did this here. What is the extreme value of those struggles if they are already famous thing like an ordinary checklist, which AI can check during its routine work? This is passed stage, you did struggle then, next generation will struggle on AI thing without this old points of stucks.
The most special cases, the most extreme genius-brain programming and inventing of the methods breakthrough of programming will be taken by the special companies and scientists (for example those who added QUERY method for REST recently). And they will learn, do and analyze their work by themselves or using AI, but main part of programmers will remain just an creative implementators and this is ok. Several dozen years ago you could own a car normally if you didn't know how to regulate a carburetor. Now, the majority of people just don't need this and what? The sacral knowing and struggling has lost? For most people - yes and thanks, God, we only glad to forgot this universe of messing around oil and dirt the hood. But serviceman can (and do) freely learn it from colleagues, manuals and internet and understands it and works and makes their servicework, if they need it and need to learn something new. In the case of programming - the colleague for some enthusiastic person, willing to learn programming and some specific thing by himself, will be AI and the learning process will be based on them.
This is the old issue, old problem and it never create an emptiness of knowledge. Nether on automation, nor on implementation of new technologies, replacing old things.
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u/deviantbono 13h ago
I don't think I have heard a single mathematician that they will be replaced by AI
which I guess means "AI is putting them out of work"
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u/madman404 13h ago
"morons who don't know how the field works are going to get confused and stop giving us money" is not the same thing as "AI is better than us and we won't need to do any work"
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u/Gamerboy11116 The Matrix did nothing wrong 12h ago
Every. Single. Time. They pick every criticism simultaneously, always with some bizarre, highly specific circumstance to allow that… instead of just like, you know, not?
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u/madman404 12h ago
I'm not sure I follow. I was saying they aren't picking every criticism, that OP is wrong about an apparent contradiction because the contradiction only exists in their incorrect understanding of the issue, as I stated above.
Are you saying that I'm wrong, that mathematicians genuinely believe AI is both ready to replace them now and not ready to replace them now on account of the review time they claim is necessary? Or something else I'm not getting?
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u/Pulselovve 13h ago
Incentive based bias nevertheless. When a professional category complains is ALWAYS ABOUT MONEY. There has never been no other reason.
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u/thee_gummbini 15h ago
Mathematicians don't get paid to review and correct others work.
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u/No-Lengthiness-6188 14h ago
isn’t scientific community based on a peer review?
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u/TobyOrNotTobyEU 14h ago
Yes, but the peer-review part is an unpaid part of the job. You also don't get any credit for doing the peer review.
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u/Working-Read1838 3h ago
You do get a little certificate on ORCID for some journals not that anybody cares
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u/thee_gummbini 14h ago
Yes and its uncredited, something we do as a professional obligation in addition to our grant funded work. You can't get grants for peer review.
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u/rushmc1 14h ago
So maybe THAT needs to change.
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u/thee_gummbini 12h ago
No debate here that there is a ton broken in academia. Not defending the system just describing it as it is.
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u/Imagutsa 11h ago
Yes. The issue of AI in research is not the idea of AI or the idea of research. It is how AI is used in research and how research is organized. AI companies should not dump untrustable proofs en masse (because checking them is mind numbing and not a good way to motivate people to do research) and researchers should be credited for something else than discoveries on trending topic. And more importantly not depend on grants that are given only for those trending discoveries.
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u/Muted_History_3032 13h ago
Yeah just place a financial incentive on peer reviewing other people’s work, what could go wrong???
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u/drraug 14h ago
Yes, but openAI is not going to review ours so why would we review theirs?
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u/No-Lengthiness-6188 11h ago
well, we truly don’t know what they do/don’t do behind the curtains… i am sure they perform some form of peer reviews/proof testing
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u/JDSpacer 12h ago
What!? That's literally more than half of science is. Review and correct others work. It's what makes Science, Science. Empirical observations, publishing your results, and rigorous attempts of falsification through peer review.
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u/Gamerboy11116 The Matrix did nothing wrong 12h ago
Statistically speaking, more than ~90% of scientific studies are not repeated more than once.
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u/Imagutsa 11h ago
Yes it is. But researchers do not get any credit, funding or recognition for that.
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u/MartinMystikJonas 15h ago edited 15h ago
Well, they do actually 🤷 Big part of professional mathematicans job is to review and refine proofs published by other mathematicians.
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u/TobyOrNotTobyEU 14h ago
They all do it, because it needs to be done. Its not the part that gets you funding.
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u/thee_gummbini 15h ago
Go on, show me the funded grant proposal for reviewing
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u/MartinMystikJonas 14h ago edited 14h ago
Grant are given to do research in some field. For methematicisns it means from big part study, review and refine proofs published by others working in same field and rarely came up woth new breakthroughts.
Also as many primary research math is mainly not funded by specific grants but by finance allocated by universities and other institutions to explore new areas.
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u/thee_gummbini 14h ago
It is true that time funded by grants is also used for review, however to get the grant you need to be able to demonstrate that you did do novel research and are capable of doing more. If you just got scooped, you get no credit for that and no credit for reviewing it when it comes for your next grant. Simply not true that most positions are hard money positions, and universities are not primary funders.
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u/BosonCollider 14h ago
Okay, but even then the review process is via journals, and OAI doesn't publish in peer reviewed journals.
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u/Imagutsa 11h ago
Also as many primary research math is mainly not funded by specific grants but by finance allocated by universities and other institutions to explore new areas.
How I wish it was so.
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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 8h ago
So this all about money?
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u/thee_gummbini 8h ago
People generally need money to live, that is usually what jobs are for, and being a mathematician is a job, so...
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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 8h ago
Okay because they’ve been complaining a lot but never said this.
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u/thee_gummbini 6h ago
Well, I know many are, but one reason I imagine it may have missed people is because many mathematicians probably don't realize they need to say this because it is intrinsic to how all academics get paid: we all know what it means if you are scooped on everything, forever, it means no more grants and no more job. People have been more vocal about the impact on the next generation of mathematicians and training, but yeah, same thing applies to current gen. The people that are needed to validate these proofs are academic mathematicians, not the applied mathematicians in industry jobs, and the way academic mathematicians get paid is grant funding.
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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 6h ago
Well, the paradigm is shifting. They need to find a new way to monetize. This happens when technology replaces a job. Instead, they’re making excuses for why they need to maintain the status quo.
This is the same thing with artists. It was never about expression and creativity. AI pumping out slop doesn’t mean people can’t produce art any more than AI playing chess doesn’t mean I can’t. It was always about not being able to make money. All other arguments are bullshit. With respect to mathematics, there’s also the credit that comes with being “first”.
So take money and ego off the table. Is there a real argument being made by mathematicians?
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u/thee_gummbini 4h ago
Yeah, we all wish academia worked better, but after a career in this shit, ain't nothing changing on a dime like this, for good and bad reasons. There is no alternative means of "monetizing" basic math than public funding - it simply is not a good people pay for. There is no upskilling and becoming a really good AI mathematician if a company with ten trillion times your resources scoops every result - you can't get a grant reviewing and correcting automated proofs, and that will never change.
You should probably either try to actually understand how the profession works, or at least have a cursory understanding of it, before deciding that you know better than that entire profession how it should work.
Money, meaning the ability for mathematicians to stay employed and feed themselves, is pretty important to the argument that mathematicians are making about "how this could mean there stop being more mathematicians."
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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 2h ago
This is a lot of words to say you think mathematics is special compared to every profession impacted by AI. Sure, let’s hold back progress and sit on proofs because these guys in particular need a paycheck. In two years, kids will be solving the equivalent of millennial prize problems in their basements on their laptops with open-weight models. You need to figure something out soon because the ship has sailed.
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u/situpes 13h ago
Did anyone ask mathematicians to review anything? It’s dumped on GitHub, feel free to ignore it and go about your day as usual
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u/thee_gummbini 12h ago
Mathematicians unfortunately don't have that luxury, as it impacting their ability to get grants and continue to do their work is the entire point here.
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u/situpes 11h ago
We fund mathematicians because mathematics is valuable; mathematics is not valuable because it funds mathematicians.
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u/Megneous 11h ago
This. Mathematicians forget that they work for the betterment of society, not to make art.
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u/thee_gummbini 10h ago
Sure, but what I'm saying is that there are no replacement mechanisms in the pipeline for funding mathematicians to do math when their job becomes validating machine proofs rather than doing novel math, even if that is some brave new world we want.
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u/situpes 9h ago
I 100% agree with that, that’s a real problem. However I think that the problem is that this is not the message that lands in the media. Statements like “mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done” is a very different message.
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u/thee_gummbini 8h ago
Mathematicians are a diverse bunch of people with a diverse bunch of opinions and perspective that range from Luddite to accelerationist, as you might imagine, so there isn't really one story to tell there. What is true for pretty much all of them (at least in the US) is that they are funded by grants that are given out to perform novel research. And again to be clear I am not saying that is good or can't change and am just saying that's how it works rn.
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u/theimposingshadow 15h ago
As I said in my comment abov, If a mathematician was working on proving something OpenAI released, now, instead of spending years trying to come up with a proof from scratch, they now have a potential solution to verify or disprove.That's still research. AI just gave them a massive head start.
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u/thee_gummbini 14h ago
Great idea, so then when its time for grant review or submitting a new grant they can point to all the papers that came of that.
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u/Tomi97_origin 14h ago
Nobody wants to pay for that. You can get grants to research unsolved problems not so much solved ones. OpenAI already claimed them as solved whether they actually are right or wrong, so they essentially blocked those paths.
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u/isthis_thing_on 14h ago
How can you say nobody wants to pay for something that happened last week? Institutions are going to have to change because of this but they are capable of changing
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u/theimposingshadow 14h ago
That's not really how research grants work. They're generally funding research programs, not paying bounties for solved problems. And OpenAI claiming to have solved something doesn't automatically make it solved. If nobody has verified the proof, determining whether it's correct is still an open research question. Finding flaws, correcting them, or establishing a valid proof is valuable research in itself.
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u/Ok-Computer-8726 13h ago
It is valuable and my guess is that is where grants are heading. At the same time I sympathize with mathematicians who are wholly uninspired by switching from thinking through the problem to verifying solutions (especially if they are near either pole on how often they are correct).
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u/theimposingshadow 13h ago
In school, math was my favorite subject. On my last year I had three different math classes. I loved understanding math. So yes I do empathize with mathematicians. But I can't see why verifying these solved problems won't lead to finding new maths that mathematicians can be excited about.
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u/Ok-Computer-8726 13h ago
It could, but I suspect there is a fear that the volume of what AI is putting out will lead to demand to just focus on verification. Maybe the expectation will be that new math avenues will lead to some general submission to some repository that gets farmed out to some major computing operation which sends back more work for verification.
Hard to say how it will play out, but in other fields that seems to be the trend. Writers become editors of AI writing, graphic designers become editors of generated art, coders review AI written code. If I had to make a guess, math as an academic endeavor will shift towards reviewing as the primary research pursuit and the academics who remain will be the ones who are content to use research as a means to teach rather than teaching as a means to do research.
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u/GoldenMuscleGod 14h ago
I think OpenAI’s behavior (and I am talking about the humans at OpenAI not the AI agents) on this issue is severely misaligned, however it exploits a misalignment between incentives and goals in academia.
I do think OpenAI should be incentivized to change the way it has been going about applying its models to producing solutions, but the mathematical community should value a mathematician who develops new theories, ideas, and ways of thinking to explain the proofs. Even people who only care about the AI being able to answer questions should value this: AI trained on those new theories, ideas, and ways of thinking will be better able to identify and answer questions that we care about, as well as better able to explain its results and convey more knowledge to us.
Of course someone in the latter camp may say that that task too will be done better by AI eventually. Maybe so, but clearly not yet (otherwise the proofs would be better written) so they still need to be trained on the output of mathematicians who have done that.
An analogy from physics: the Lorentz transform equations were known before Einstein, and they already implicitly contain the ideas of length contraction, time dilation, and relativity of simultaneity from special relativity. Arguably Einstein’s core contribution was developing a new way of thinking about and using these ideas. But this part of what Einstein did did not involve new math or new empirical predictions, although it led to the development of new math and new empirical predictions. This kind of “theory-crafting” can be hard to quantify though which is why a lot of incentives in math are targeted at more measurable metrics like “new theorems proved.”
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u/pandelin_ 12h ago
Except the reality of such work is much closer to shoveling shit than any kind of groundbreaking research. Top minds will not want to do that for very long.
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u/ReddBroccoli 14h ago
And what's their incentive if they are not going to get any of the credit?
Checking somebody else's work and coming up with your own are two entirely different things as far as advancing one's profession
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u/rushmc1 14h ago
Not everyone is in it for the "credit."
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u/Inside-Noise6804 13h ago
You do need the "credit" for promotion and other sort of professional growth in academia.
Publishing your own work is one of the major ways of doing that. Unless they change that or accept proofreading an Ai's solution as a substitute for Publishing I can I understand why some mathematicians are wary.
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u/ReddBroccoli 10h ago
As far as professional humans who actually understand these concepts, I'm assuming you don't know many of them in person if you say something like that
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u/eurydicewrites 11h ago
Lol yes they do. That is the scientific method. Please stop
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u/thee_gummbini 10h ago
I actually am a scientist and have several good friends that are mathematicians. That might be how the scientific method works in your undergrad textbooks, but it is not how the scientific method works in practice for any of us.
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u/eurydicewrites 9h ago
Refereeing for a journal is unpaid, agreed. That's one corner of the field. Outside journals, checking and reproducing other people's mathematical work is a paid job, and a big one: model validation teams at every bank and insurer, actuarial review, trial statisticians re-running analyses, formal verification of software and hardware, audit, and now the people checking machine-generated proofs. Verification isn't an undergrad textbook idea....
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u/TurboFucker69 8h ago
So: mathematicians who work outside their get paid for work that most mathematicians don’t. In other news: art history degree holder makes $300k a year on OnlyFans 🤣
Seriously though, the specific point here is that the work in question which actually requires verification are academic proofs, and the original commenter is correct: mathematicians aren’t paid to verify other people’s academic proofs.
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u/JacenVane 6h ago
mathematicians aren’t paid to verify other people’s academic proofs.
I believe you that Academic mathematicians aren’t paid to verify other people’s academic proofs, but the person you're responding to seems to have shown a number of groups who are paid to review the work of academics.
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u/go_birds_dickhead76 9h ago
Mathematicians referee others papers for free. This gives you good graces with the journal so that they are more likely to publish your work in the future.
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u/eurydicewrites 9h ago
Lol there are entire lines of work who hire mathematicians for their ability to verify and and replicate results. Y'all are crazy.
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u/go_birds_dickhead76 9h ago
I’m just telling you how the peer review process works bud
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u/CapitalEmployer 9h ago
The scientific method is scientists reviewing papers for free so for profit magasines can make you pay to publish your research and also make people pay to view your research and distribute those juicy profits to shareholders.
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u/isthis_thing_on 14h ago
A proof sitting on a table that no one but a computer has verified is useless. If mathematicians refuse to review it because they're not getting paid for it and because it's incredibly dense computer generated work the proof essentially doesn't exist. Whatever problem that proof claims to solve is still open in that case is it not? Therefore funding can still be applied for and the Schrodinger's proof can either be used or not to help solve that problem.
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u/thee_gummbini 14h ago
Untested theory since the problem is so new, I would highly doubt the funding agencies would see it that way. A grant that's like "this might already be solved, we're not really sure. We're just going to do custodial work on an ever growing mountain of machine results" is not compelling. Maybe the funding agencies adapt, they probably won't - they haven't for similar changes in professional landscape and similar work in other fields (synthesis of existing partial results) is unfunded.
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u/AffectionateTwo3405 11h ago
Wow genius maybe that's where the field will move and pay then
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u/thee_gummbini 10h ago
If you have any idea how this has played out with prior disruptive technologies, the funding agencies are nowhere near as nimble as this to be able to adapt how funding gets disbursed on a dime.
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u/AffectionateTwo3405 9h ago
Yeah man this seems 1 to 1 with previous technological disruptions. Ironclad
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u/thee_gummbini 8h ago
Call me when you have ever sat on an NSF or NIH study section and reviewed grant proposals and then we can talk about how easy it is to change the way funding gets allocated.
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u/AffectionateTwo3405 7h ago
Yeah, the mathematicians don't seem worried about change either.
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u/thee_gummbini 6h ago
Are you suggesting you have talked to all mathematicians? Including the ones who are actively campaigning that this is going too fast and will ruin the academic pursuit of mathematics?
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u/Atlantyan 14h ago
Wait until AI starts coming up with new science that we won't be able to understand.
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u/WloveW ▪️:partyparrot: 15h ago
Is openai going to pay the mathematicians to prove the AI proofs? Mathematicians need to eat.
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u/Eliv_nurotic 14h ago
Is the lamppost manufacturer going to pay the lamp lighters? Lamp lighters need to eat.
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u/WloveW ▪️:partyparrot: 14h ago
Was the cartoon about the 1900s electrical revolution? No.
The AI revolution is going to be a major overhaul of pretty much every industry in the world, mildly similar to electrification. It doesn't mean that stupid arguments like in the cartoon are valid.
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u/theimposingshadow 15h ago
LOL, who's paying mathematicians to research these problems right now? Universities, research institutions, grants, etc.
The difference is that instead of spending years trying to come up with a proof from scratch, they now have a potential solution to verify or disprove.
That's still research. AI just gave them a massive head start.
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u/itsnickk 15h ago
Yeah, those grants and institutions are paying those mathematicians. I don't see OpenAI moving to pay them to prove their proofs. They won't even give the mathematicians access to the internal model or its reasoning behind the proofs.
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u/WloveW ▪️:partyparrot: 15h ago edited 14h ago
What incentive does the university have to have their mathematicians check AI work though? Why doesn't AI check the AI's work if it's so brilliant?
There is no glory for the university when profs prove AI work. You want universities to pay for finishing up the AIs job
Edit not to mention this pisses on the reason why many choose to be mathematicians. THEY WANT TO MAKE THE DISCOVERIES. They want the prestige. This denies them prestige.
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u/LairdPeon 14h ago
Why wouldn't they? They have basically infinite money apparently. They probably could've permanently bought every mathematician in the world with how much they've spent on AI training.
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins 14h ago
It was funny that Buckmaster, was saying that the proofs by AI aren't even english and aren't decipherable, but they are correct. Then when asked how he knows they are correct, he said they checked with other models.
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u/spaceprinceps 8h ago edited 8h ago
I only know what I hear on podcasts, but I heard the results reported on were inscrutable and peer review is gonna be difficult compared to human work published. It sounds like telling a python developer you did your work and when they go to check your work it's in malbolge (look it up it's a joke programming language)
(=<`#9]~6ZY327Uv4-QsqpMn&+Ij"'E%e{Ab~w=_:]Kw%o44Uqp0/Q?xNvL:`H%c#DD2^WV>gY;dts76qKJImZkjEdit: That's a hello world program in it
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u/BosonCollider 14h ago edited 14h ago
LLMs + Lean made proofs go from scarce to abundant, but they don't currently change much when it comes to definitions, theory building, or asking the right conjectures.
The main question ofc is how definitions will be ranked in the future. Historically, proving hard problems was a good measuring stick since that meant that the abstractions used were worthwhile, or at least the abstractions that showed up in famous proofs got popular and survived. Nowadays, it's harder to tell since models will keep getting better and that effect is hard to tell apart from the model.
Would topological spaces have been discovered if we had LLMs do real analysis proofs? I don't know. I don't think any LLM right now would come up with that definition from scratch, but they are extremely useful to express a lot of problems.
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u/AshuraBaron 14h ago
Just weird to see pro-AI people shitting on mathematicians lately. These things aren't in competition.
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u/rushmc1 14h ago
I think you meant to say "anti-AI people shitting on pro-AI people."
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u/Helloiamwhoiam 12h ago
Yes that too is happening, but for good reasons.
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u/rushmc1 12h ago
If by "good" you mean "irrational" and "fear-based."
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u/Tago238238 12h ago
What’s irrational? Even the most “positive” view pushed by companies about AI is the scariest shit I’ve ever fucking heard. I don’t want to live in a jobless society, I think it’s impossible to gain meaning in life if you know there’s not even a shred of potential for you to ever contribute something.
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u/Eliv_nurotic 14h ago
Did you read the recent statement from the association for human mathematicians reposted by Terence tao? They despise ai lol
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u/AshuraBaron 14h ago
Um, no? That's not what he said at all. He even talked about how AI will improve mathematics and how he uses it. You seem to be basing your opinion of meme's and second hand accounts that want to create a division. Just because someone isn't going "yeah I'm gonna be replaced any day now with an RTX Spark" doesn't mean they despise AI.
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u/Inside-Noise6804 13h ago
You would do well to read the statement yourself rather than the regurgitation of others
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u/BassMaster516 13h ago
It is not gonna take jobs from mathematicians. There will be more mathematicians and yes, they will use AI
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u/theimposingshadow 13h ago
This is my point of view too!
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u/BassMaster516 13h ago
I’ve seen some really dumb takes recently basically saying that mathematics/higher education is a scam and we won’t need mathematicians anymore. All we need is a guy to prompt AI like come on
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u/BubBidderskins Proud Luddite 13h ago
The worry has never been that "AI" can actually do anyone's job: that would be idiotic. The worry is that morons in charge will think that and fire people leaving us without math or mathematics.
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u/spreadlove5683 ▪️agi 2032. Predicted during mid 2025. 4h ago
what do you mean? ai will definitely be able to do people's jobs.
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u/BubBidderskins Proud Luddite 2h ago
???????
you seriously think a simple autcomplete function can do anyone's job? are u high?
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u/spreadlove5683 ▪️agi 2032. Predicted during mid 2025. 2h ago edited 2h ago
yes, I use it all the time to do work in my accounting software Rent Manager for the two apartment complexes I run. With guardrails for now, but it's getting close to reliable enough to not even need them. Just one year ago, coding agents were just barely starting and were so much worse than today. Our properties get HUD audited and our books have to be correct. Here is also a quote from a math fields medalist recently about you know, ai solving idk (100+?) of the most famous math problems that the smartest mathematicians alive haven't been able to crack for decades. keep in mind the first major math problem ai solved was the unit distance problem in May. 5 months later and it's solving more of the most famous problems per unit of time than humans by more than a couple orders of magnitude. I think probably next year is when we start seeing a lot of white collar disruption.
Hugo Duminil-Copin
Fields Medal (2022) Professor, IHES and University of Geneva
""" I expected that one day we would be surpassed, and that it would happen systematically. But yesterday's announcement hit with a force I had not anticipated. Dozens of papers deal with topics I was working on. Between results that beat you to the finish line and thousand-page proofs, I don't even know where to look anymore.
Not a single one of the major open problems I have publicly mentioned throughout my career (whether in a talk, a lecture, an article, or even a grant proposal) was left untouched by the announcement. Everything has been claimed to be proved.
I expected to see a few of them in the list. But not all of them. Not all at once. Not with such nonchalance.
"For the glory of the human mind," they said...
The shock is immense. I am paralysed. Tomorrow, we will find a way forward. We will rethink our profession and how we work. We are a resilient community, and I have no doubt that we will adapt. But for now, I simply don't have the energy. I think back on all those years, all those faces... I think of my colleagues, my students... And I fear I won't be able to find the right words. """
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u/hmmnnmmn 11h ago
The true purpose of solving unsolved maths is to grow our understanding of nature and find new inventions or solutions to problems using that math.
There is a separate issue that math is also a profession, and so the people who search for those solutions have an additional benefit they are seeking, which is inherently selfish, but a means to make ends meet, which is the fame and fortune which accompanies these sort of proofs. That is what AI is disrupting, and what people are offended by.
People in general should not be offended by AI solving those problems faster than humans did. If the goal was always just about getting recognized for the solution rather than the solution itself, isn’t that sort of like a biomedical company discovering the cure for cancer and then suppressing it so they can continue to profit off of other cancer treatments?
The danger now is if we ridicule the AI firms for these sort of drops, then they might be inclined to not share them anymore, and keep them secret, and then profit off of whatever advantage they hold from having that knowledge while no one else has it.
Thus, we should be celebrating these results two-fold; one for the achievement, and one for it being shared.
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u/The-King-Tomato 10h ago
They have lean to check the answers. Fucking idiots believing this shitty meme.
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u/BananaBeanie 9h ago
Just a thought, but at what point we can be sure an AI won't hallucinate but is always correct?
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u/Living-Breakfast-464 3h ago
I think it's hilarious how this sub has suddenly decided that mathematicians are the bad guys now. Not politicians, or CEOs trying to sell GPUs or create 2T IPOs by fearmongering and spreading bullshit. But Mathematicians. 😂
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u/Efficient-Opinion-92 15h ago
Their whole profession can be automated as AI taste and explanation improves
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u/Cryptizard 12h ago
Why do you think that is guaranteed? There is no reinforcement learning you can do for taste.
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u/theimposingshadow 15h ago
I disagree, I think we will always have some human mathematicians/ researchers to interpret what AI produces or to at least guve the 👍. I believe that ninety percent, if not more, of the jobs are gonna be automated in the next 10 to 20 years, but I think some humans that still wanna work will still be in the fields. They want to be in and representing their specific fields.
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u/Efficient-Opinion-92 15h ago
I disagree AGI/ASI by definition is expert/superhuman at most or all domains.
Soon it will explain better than any person can.
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u/theimposingshadow 14h ago
I agree with you, but I think some humans will still want to be involved
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u/Difficult_Key2534 14h ago
As hobby - why not? As profession - why?
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u/Fmeson 13h ago
Because the understanding of math provides value and drives innnovation. Up until the point where all human thinking is obsolete, humans understanding math will be crucial to making progress.
You can have an automated research keep making proofs for forever, but if you dont understand them, then you will not make optimal use of the discoveries.
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u/Difficult_Key2534 12h ago
Let me put it another way.
Suppose it takes mathematicians years to understand what the AI has actually solved. Does the AI stop working in the meantime? No. That means within months, instead of 700 AI-solved problems on the table, there might be, say, 7,000. And now, it would take decades, not years, to comprehend them. But does AI progress halt? No. Suppose the AI outlines how to achieve X, Y, Z, etc., based on this new knowledge. Do humans understand exactly *why* it works at that stage? Most likely not. Suppose humans run tests and the effectiveness of X, Y, Z, etc., is confirmed—meaning the new knowledge can now be put into practice. Humans apply that knowledge. Would it have been more optimal to wait decades for mathematicians to figure out the "why"? I doubt it.
In my view, the main reason this isn't happening yet is the high cost. But if problems really can be solved in just three hours, that won't be an issue by 2027, and that year will mark a turning point for literally everything.
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u/RunReal959595 15h ago
If that’s the case then mathematicians will just stop cooperating with ai companies entirely and they’ll no longer have training data on cutting edge fields. Actually we should probably just do that now.
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u/Efficient-Opinion-92 15h ago
That’s just holding back human progress to stroke thier egos , They won’t even be needed tbh.
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u/RunReal959595 15h ago
Wanting to preserve human culture isn’t about “preserving ego,” you’re just a midwit who resents those who actually worked hard to become good at something.
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u/Smith7929 14h ago
AI delivery math proofs is destroying human culture. Do you people hear yourselves?
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u/Helloiamwhoiam 12h ago
It's been jarring to watch how many pro-AI folks have so quickly mocked and devalued human intelligence now that these machines indubitably surpass us in many ways
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u/yota-code 14h ago
You have to imagine that, the goal of mathematics is to increase the understanding of new concepts. This is always a two sided coin, discovery and contribution to the knowledge pyramid.
Now, you have a new actor, which spurts new proofs by hundreds but ! Some are plain copywrite infringement or theft, some are false (if someone spend time to prove it), most of them are utterly strange. Almost none of them contribute to maths as a shared knowledge.
And now, we ask mathematicians to stop whining and sort what's good or not from this pile of shit? I understand why they are not happy
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u/Sirosim_Celojuma 14h ago
Well that recent mathematical discovery will be easy to confirm. The mathematicians who were developing it were days away from their conclusion and apparently their AI prompts were gathered, deidentified, annonymized, and collected into general learning, and then the AI figured it out. Basically, if you ask the humans to confirm if their model is in fact the precursor model to that which AI came up with, then the decades of proof already exist.
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u/Test_Account_2026 13h ago
It's going to put shitty mathematicians out of work, which is why people who embrace mediocrity are so against it. Have to remember a lot of people in scientific circles are privileged elites, and/or salesmen in disguise. The actual number of people meaningfully contributing to scientific advancements is probably under 1% compared to the number of "scientists" currently employed.
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u/Tago238238 11h ago
Part of what makes AI good at solving these problems is how much literature it’s able to draw from, including techniques from obscure papers that haven’t been cited much at all. I think that proves the opposite of the idea that it’s only the most elite of researchers who have contributed to human knowledge in any substantial way.
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u/bethesda_gamer 11h ago
Somewhere out the the ghost of some poor mathematician no one listened to is smiling
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u/Test_Account_2026 11h ago
I didn't say it was the elites contributing, I said it's a very small percentage. Many of the "elites" are simply showmen.
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u/HolographicState 10h ago
Privileged elites? No. We’re not in the 18th century anymore. Most scientists today come from middle class backgrounds. Look at the typical population of grad students in a PhD program - they are dirt poor, scrounging for free food at orientation events like rodents.
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u/postmath_ 9h ago edited 9h ago
what are you not mediocre at again?
cause you sure as shit dont understand science, or mathematics.
these problems that OpenAI solved have no utility what so ever. They were never meant to be solved by a yes or no question. Solving them are ways for scientists to discover methods that can be meaningful in other ways. There is absolutely no value in an AI solving them, it just destroys the careers of people.
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u/Fickle_Lime9223 8h ago
That has gotta be the most inaccurate statement I’ve ever read. You do realize most scientific research is done through academia right? You’re really about to tell me the professors who make $100K a year are secretly billionaires out to get us?
If you’ve been to college, you’d know how untrue this is. So I guess that tells us your level of education…
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u/DiamondDramatic9551 14h ago
This talk about mathmeticians responses is just noise anyway. The way more important thing is that AI mastery of theoretical math will only increase and it will very probably spill over to applied math soon.
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u/FewEquipment9771 12h ago
Ever heard of Lean?
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u/Archway9 12h ago
AI is famously good a tricking lean, even models available to the public do this
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u/FewEquipment9771 11h ago
Yeah Today I read this article and kinda get what you mean. There's still a long way to go
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u/RunReal959595 15h ago
It’s almost as if OP hasn’t actually read what mathematicians are saying about this