Comment by Eufrat
11 hours ago
But that’s exactly my point.
These are absolutely worth studying, but being what they are, nobody should be dumping massive amounts of money on them. I would not find it persuasive if researchers used LLMs to solve the Collatz conjecture or finally decode Etruscan. These are extremely valuable, but it is unlikely to be worth it for an LLM just grinding tokens like crazy to do it.
If solving even the biggest problems in pure maths is not worth it for you, then I guess we should stop all the pure maths research - researchers are getting paid much more than potential token spend, frequently for decades and they frequently work on much less important and easier problems.
Is it worth it to buy a super-yacht?
No.
Maybe... but I would love if 1% of the investment in AI were redirected to the mathematics education and professional research that would allow progress on any of these problems...