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Comment by wbhart

10 hours ago

I have not been working on formalization but theorem proving, so I can't confidently answer some of those questions.

However, I recognise that there is not so much training data for LLMs wanting to use the Lean language. Moreover, you are really teaching it how to apply "Lean tactics", which may or may not be related to what mathematicians do in standard texts on which LLMs have trained. Finally, the foundations are different: dependent type theory, instead of the set theory that mathematicians use.

My own personal perspective is that esoteric formal languages serve a purpose, but not this one. Most mathematicians have not been hot on the idea (with a handful of famous exceptions). But the idea seems to have gained a lot of traction anyway.

I'd personally like to see more money put into informal symbolic theorem proving tools which can very rapidly find a solution as close to natural language and the usual foundations as possible. But funding seems to be a huge issue. Academia has been bled dry, and no one has an appetite for huge multi-year projects of that kind.