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Comment by netvarun

5 days ago

I posted a similar comment when the winners were leaked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48906573

i’d like to revise my earlier comment: 2022 may have been the last time we had pure humans win a Fields Medal.

I’m fairly certain this batch's winners used LLMs for research, lit-revews, reviewing work, and calculations... perhaps not enough to count as a co-author, but still enough to handle a lot of the grunt work.

Who would have imagined the pace of progress in LLM-powered math..

21 comments

netvarun

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anvuong  5 days ago

It's like saying:

- winners in the 30s were the last time we have pure human to win (before computer)

- winners in the 70s were the last time we have pure human to win (before internet)

- winners in the 90s were the last time we have pure human to win (before search engine)

Why can't we treat LLMs as just another tool like computers, search engines, computing libraries? Why do people keep trying to anthropomorphizing these binaries?

People in the 1800s used to win awards and acclamation by simply hand-cranking numbers for popular calculations (Pi, error functions, etc.) and printing them in a book. This will just be the same thing.

  • falcor84  5 days ago

    But it's not the same thing. I went through this conversation between Terry Tao and ChatGPT about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample [0] and it looks a lot more like a conversation between peers than him using a tool.

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010345

    • anvuong  5 days ago

      Well, how many humans do you think are able to prompt this to the LLM?

      "The homogeneity in x is an intertwining between a dilation (x,r,u) to (lambda x, r,u) and a dilation (P,Q,R) to (lambda^-2 P, lambda^-1 Q, lambda R) which seems to collapse the 3d jacobian to a sort of twisted 2d jacobian. Is there a general theory of such twisted jacobians and do you have any sense why those particular dilation weights were used?"

      "I can see why the five-dimensional Jacobian has a nice monomial form in rho. Why does this make the three-dimensional Jacobian after restricting to c_2 = rho = 1 and eliminating the delta, eps variables also a monomial (now in x)? Is there some block-diagonal structure or something in the 5D Hessian that allows for a nice reduction? I would have expected some sort of Schur's complement type operation to appear."

      I, and probably most people on here, won't be able to get the LLM to write such a detailed conversation, because we are not experts in this field. They are tools.

      4 replies →

    • applfanboysbgon  5 days ago

      "Looks like" being the operative keyword there. Do you feel like you're having a conversation with a peer when you prompt an LLM in the topic you're an expert of? For the love of God, I'd hope not. The whole point is that, even though these things are really good at generating what looks like human output, they are still just regular software algorithms.

      5 replies →

  • azan_  5 days ago

    If you say "find some unsolved graph theory problem and counterexample for it" and LLM actually does it, is it really you that solved the problem? That's the difference vs other tools.

    • fn-mote  5 days ago

      Is this a purely hypothetical question?

      Or are you saying that’s what happened in this case. Because that’s not the way I understand it.

      3 replies →

num42  5 days ago

"2026 may be the last time pure humans win the Fields Medal. By 2030, AI could be a coauthor on many winning results" - netvarun

Original comment Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48906573

Hey @netvarun, sorry about that. I originally read it in one of your comments, and I should have credited you when I mentioned it. My apologies.

There was never my intention to plagiarize. That's also why I wrote "this prediction" rather than "my prediction" but I still should have mentioned the source. My apologies again.Hope you understand.

neaden  5 days ago

What do you base that certainty on? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am also skeptical you are correct and since it is four people you can probably look into if any of them have talked about it instead of just deciding that what you think is true.