Comment by moomoo11
18 hours ago
silly question, i don't mean to come off wrong or anything..
but at least as a software engineer, i always knew my work was "never done" and so it was common to build a bunch of code that might be thrown away, either because it didn't serve our customers (the mvp or pilot fails to meet demand), or because we found a better way to do it and so we deprecate it.
some people got too attached to the code and honestly they were the types to be filtered out fast.. way too emotional and hard to work with. getting attached to code meant you actually don't advance (after all, in our case, we were a business serving customers and not a hobby artisan shop). attachment leads one to hold back due to some misplaced cognitive load.
isn't the goal of working on "advancing the field/product/whatever" to always be solving/selling/whatever?
maybe in your hands, with your knowledge and experience over the last 20+ years, you can use AI to make leaps and bounds by steering it properly towards whatever solution or goal?
If you read all the replies of the OP you would know that They tried to make progress with fable and did not get further, so at the moment the only person in the field is OpenAI. And secondly moving on to the next solution if the last one did not work means very different things, SWEs have dev tools to do this OpenAI is closed source and gives them nothing to move on with.
Also there is a larger epistemic problem with the argument to "using AI to meet the goal or solution", which is that the goal is to mentor and train future mathematicians to advance the field.
There is a similar issue in software engineering too: if no one hires junior engineers because AI can do all the work then the upstream pipeline of engineers qualified to work on difficult architectural problems would dry up.
This importance of this is being felt by mathematicians more acutely because the field will collapse quickly if people refuse to join it.
Indeed!
I've been mentoring (or so I'd like to think) a very bright undergraduate mathematician, in fact he was the one who pointed out the final irreducible flaw in my proof last summer. And I am extremely curious to see what he does and if he even finishes his degree in mathematics. He had already expressed to me some dismay that his summer undergrad research program with several Ivy-league math majors got blown out of the water by a few hours of a frontier model. It's making everyone question what the future will look like and what education and training and certification will even look like.
But the future belongs to those who show up. Maybe this is the beginning of a mass democratization of scientific and math research, maybe we are going back to the gentleman-scholar model of amateur researchers and Twitter will be the new Journal of the Royal Society.
> But the future belongs to those who show up. Maybe this is the beginning of a mass democratization of scientific and math research, maybe we are going back to the gentleman-scholar model of amateur researchers and Twitter will be the new Journal of the Royal Society.
i hope so!