Comment by doubtfuluser
9 hours ago
Im surprised about the sentiment in this discussion.
I totally see the problem Terence is describing. We are loosing a lot in understanding and focus if it continues like that. The solution found for Navier Stokes doesn’t have much „real value“ - but what almost always happened in the past when people worked on the difficult problems, these sparked new ideas / new theorems that broadened our knowledge. Think back at your grad studies, figuring out a proof as homework was hard, sometimes incredibly hard, but while doing it we gained a lot of understanding how things work. Now asking AI for the solution and „just“ getting it, risks our understanding, our creativity and our ability to connect the dots with other territories. I see it in students nowadays, there is much less understanding, much less creativity in finding solutions. I truly think this „short-path“ solution with the „death of struggle is one of the biggest risks with AI already for human development
His complaint is a very weak argument.
If the complaint is about AI just giving answers and not good understanding around them, or frameworks that lead to more solutions from them, then that means there is a gap that can be filled by human mathematicians.
So all the AI has done has actually made mathematicians lives easier and provided them with an opportunity to fill that gap. They should be using it to do that, instead of complaining.
In fact, I would bet if this gap were not present, it'd be an even worse complaint: Now we have absolutely nothing to do in the field.
Some people are just out there doing automated math proofs for reasons. If you want understanding, value, and edification, that is on you, not them.