I'm a lot more skeptical. I'm not a mathematician, but from my use of LLMs a very clear pattern of what they are good and bad at has emerged. They are extremely good at combining large amounts of information, and it seems this is what the current AI results in mathematics are. There are so many subfieleds of math with ties to each other, so many papers and niche results, that no human could ever read, comprehend, connect and organize that information in their brains. Pretty much all of it was created by humans. And there is real value in doing this and creating new results from what we've already discovered.
But there also is another type of discovery that requires taking a step back and looking at the problem from a different angle. If you are an engineer, how often has an LLM told you (without you explicitly prompting for it): Wait, what you are doing here doesn't really make sense, there exists a much more elegant abstraction that nobody has thought of, let's remove all that code, let's tackle the problem in a different way by thinking from first principles. Pretty much never. But in science a lot of the biggest discoveries have come from this kind of first principle thinking, questioning existing work and approaches and going against what already exists, not combining all existing data which is likely to be just a local optimum.
LLM's are very outcome oriented and i think this is where your observation comes from. You tell LLM you want something, it doesn't even question the premise and just starts calculating 100 different ways to get there. LLM's have knowledge but lack wisdom.
LLMs are inexplicably good at working within any tight feedback loop to coerce the desired solution. This is precisely why proof assistants + LLMs are non intuitively successful.
This is also why they're so good at creating three.js or Blender work when the output is so easily constrained to "Look exactly like that". I recently posted https://www.ambionix.com/blog/introducing-the-czp-1/ on here, and the audio engine in that was developed in that way.
It is true that it would be astounding to find if anyone has seen a LLM produce any useful generalization of anything resulting in a simplification. They seem to have a direct tendency to do the opposite. The brutal reality is humans have also undervalued this capability for a long time (I think the Poincare/Hilbert debate is relevant) to the point we are also taught that generalizations are, generally, bad and wrong.
I was working on a project recently where I wanted to express a relationship (that I knew existed, but didn't know how to express) between four measured scalar values. Astra insisted there was no relationship, and that any correlation wouldn't make sense.
Eventually, by walking through them, it proposed an additional fifth value and from there was able to tie everything together.
Sometimes you just gotta hit the machine until it works again.
> there exists a much more elegant abstraction that nobody has thought of, let's remove all that code, let's tackle the problem in a different way by thinking from first principles.
You literally just have to ask it. Before I left software engineering in April, I was using Claude for re-architecture all the time.
But no, it doesn't assume it should re-architect what you're handing it when you haven't asked it to.
> If you are an engineer, how often has an LLM told you (without you explicitly prompting for it): Wait, what you are doing here doesn't really make sense, there exists a much more elegant abstraction that nobody has thought of, let's remove all that code, let's tackle the problem in a different way by thinking from first principles.
I explicitly request it. It's not great at coming up with interesting ideas, but neither am I, and it can sure iterate on them faster than I can...
A very balanced perspective, and the concerns he raises are reasonable. He acknowledges that AI is going to transform mathematics, but simply dumping proofs on the math community and expecting others to do the grunt work of verifying, refining, and expanding on them is hardly a productive way to advance the field.
There seems to be more interest in hitting some arbitrary benchmark (we proved X unsolved problems) than in genuinely contributing to mathematics. But what else is to be expected? It's become a maniacal race with too much money. Too much effort is being invested in proving that the exponential curve is still holding.
I wonder if top labs will soon abandon math progress like they did go and chess.
In example of go where I'm more familiar Google deep mind poured large resources to get a super human performance first, establish superiority and abandon it. The community then built their own tools starting from reproducing their papers.
I think similar thing might happen to math. Nobody outside of math cares too much about Hamiltonian cycles in some bizarre graphs or proving lower bounds on complexity of some problem.
Once those results stop being worthy of mainstream media attention, they will abandon math and the progress will be done by mathemicians guiding the models and the community will likely establish some new rules about what makes a valuable contribution. Merely solving not yet solved problem might not be it anymore.
The amount of money they're lately ploughing into proving math theorems is inconsistent with how societies and markets have priced pure mathematics. The entire US federal budget for math research is something like $100M annually. A single college football coach can already earn 10 percent of that.
Pretty much the only enterprise that historically pays some mathematicians handsomely is quant finance, but those people are actually compensated not for proving theorems but rather for statistical modeling and programming skills. And even that industry is so technologically driven these days that pure research mathematicians no longer hold a clear edge over strong programmers with undergrad level probability and statistics at their fingertips.
I think this is an interesting and good theory. They've probably eked out the large majority of the PR benefit at this point, so whether they continue in this vein will tell us a lot about their motivations for this work.
To take this to the next step, what happened after deep mind pretty much solved Go is that they started looking for the next set of things that hadn't been done yet. It does strike me as very likely that this will follow that same path.
I don't think it will be the case, maths have real utility. I found something interesting at the intersection of combinatorics and information geometry. To be quite frank I don't understand what I'm doing. And yet, when I ask ChatGPT to use the framework we're developing to write an algorithm, it turns out it has quasi-parity with the state of the art. I have to measure absolute perfs to decide which one is better – theirs, not mine. Ok. Time to keep improving on what I have. And this implies dropping the code and going back to the blackboard doing more super abstract math that are way out of my league.
Interesting path forwards, and probably partly true, but there are some important distinctions:
Go was a specialized application. All the math results come as a side effect of reading the whole internet, and it will keep reading the whole internet. It will keep practicing thinking questions. Actually, math might be one of the best ways to keep them contemplating and measure their contemplation abilities, so math will always stay in the loop.
Also, math might not be useful just for humanity, but also for AI, so the system might actively benefit from new math results itself. (Not sure if any of the recent proofs qualify, but future work might.)
> I wonder if top labs will soon abandon math progress like they did go and chess.
I definitely think that this is marketing, just "with good side effects". My doubt is when they will be able to move to "marketing with better side effects", that is, research with more concrete outcomes (health, materials etc.).
This misses the raw advantage of a good proof. It makes conceptualization simpler. In some ways math is like a hash list of of theorems. This list makes it simpler to prove other calculations, and will always be useful, to both humans and AI models. I can see two new directions 1 - the creation of specialist theorem models; that can answer questions efficiently about one topic and 2 - we probably need to incentivize and codify ownership of theorems; charging a proportion of the compute saved by using them. Ultimately enabling mathematicians to be paid our true market value!
I had the same idea recently. You've solved all the famous conjectures (all formulated by humans because humans found them interesting), what next? I doubt "AI formulated a math conjecture that nobody else cares about and immediately solved it" will produce that much hype. The actually interesting thing is indeed how mathematicians themselves will use these AI models going forward and how that will shape mathematics of the future.
AlphaGo and AlphaZero weren't generalized models. Math capability will presumably keep improving along with the other general capabilities, even if there wasn't a special RL focus for math itself.
Yeah chess is a good example. DeepMind came for publicity with AlphaZero. Arranged a match with Stockfish with rigged rules to make AlphaZero look better than it really was (it was amazing but the match wasn't fair) and then just published some games and went home.
I was bitter about that back in the day as I hoped for more answers, more matches, more "truth" about chess being shown. Soon after that community project Leela Chess Zero was started and not only surpassed original AlphaZero but added few hundred ELO points over it. Then the combination of NN and classical engines happened with NNUE and current Stockfish is again a few hundred ELO points stronger.
Today we pretty much know the truth in chess for all practical purposes. Human analysts/preparation experts focus on finding interesting path and opponent profiling (what is the most unpleasant for the opponent to face). They don't look for truth anymore. The game is doing great, it's more popular than it ever was.
I disagree. Firstly, people in AI likely care about math on a personal level. Secondly math is useful. Playing go or chess is basically a party trick. Being useful gives it staying power.
But, I do think you are right that there will be some level of moving on. The spotlight is currently on maths and that won't last. It will move to some other area where there is more impact to be had. So while they might shift gears and put less focus on math, it will always be there as part of the portfolio.
I think there’s a venue where they start focusing on introducing hypotheses where the model currently can’t solve it, or maybe this is already happening?
Being able to present useful novel ideas would likely generate a lot of press, for a while. I don’t know how this would look since I’m useless at math, but Im sure there are plenty of unknown problems with massive implications, that once formulated can be solved.
This argument implicitly makes a few assumptions which will probably not hold in the very near future.
One is that AI will continue hallucinating in a manner that is not easy to verify, second is that AI will not be enhanced to produced more simplified amd robust outputs, and third that a human will be required to do that.
What humans in the loop are doing now is verify the process, propose shortcuts and add legitimacy, through the verification process, if that ends up being succesful its highly likely a lot less mathematicians will be required in the future.
The conclusion that this is not productive focuses on the mathematicians, but it is very productive in terms of hundreds of proofs being produced that had previously consumed uncountable hours of the brightest minds. Unless it ends up being the greatest hallucination ever ofcourse
Putting hallucination aside, LLM "theory of mind" has gotten worse over time. I feel it peaked in Opus 3 and Sonnet 3.5, GPT 4 and then GPT 4.5 for OpenAI. Since then, even with Opus 5.5, phrasing has needed careful crafting, in order that it not be taken too literally. OpenAI models suffer from this much more than Anthropic models but Claudes have backslid over time too.
This means when writing documentation, tutorials or commit messages, their output is often a garbled jumble. Assuming shared context, using invented terminology without explaining, leaking conversational states due to improper epistemic boundaries and failing to model the reader. This all usually leads to their freely generated explanations being terrible. Getting good explanations requires chaining questions that force them to line things up properly, which is not easy the less you know. These failures as something LLMs naturally struggle with make sense, given the nature of attention and RL with weak signals from human data.
Math is not merely a collection of proofs, it's a way of understanding. A proof presented in a manner that cannot be incorporated remains useless. It does not make it's way to physics like Riemannian geometry and matrix math did. This is no less true when done by humans too.
Your hallucination conclusion, checking if a proof is one, is exactly the counterproductive cost.
Most of us cannot verify that the claims in the OpenAI lore dump are in fact all correct. It will take tons of work from experts to do this. It took subject expert mathematicians to identify the discrepancy and disconnect in the Navier Stokes proofs, for example. LLMs will struggle to make use of their own proofs or turn them into knowledge that accumulates over time.
The act of proving is often more valuable than the proof itself. Human constraints and limitations force us to invent tools and abstractions that a 100,000 x 1M context swarm can bypass. The tradeoff from that AI swarm advantage is work that doesn't usually lend itself to being built upon. It's like doing all the side quests and reading all the books of an RPG versus min maxing a straight path with a guide. We might try to identify new abstractions, but the fact that we don't get access to CoT and that much of it will be illegible means mining LLM traces for what human mathematicians produce naturally will be a tedious chore.
> One is that AI will continue hallucinating in a manner that is not easy to verify
It is an old saw at this point, but what an LLM does still cannot be divided into hallucination and non-hallucination. This is literally an anthropomorphism trap.
Layers and layers of application-specific verification can reduce the risks inherent to LLMs, to a really remarkable degree, but nothing about what these tools are suggests that this problem will go away; it will just bubble up again somewhere else.
> assumptions which will probably not hold in the very near future [...] One is that AI will continue hallucinating in a manner that is not easy to verify
Hold up, that's an even bigger assumption in the opposite direction, and I don't see anything to support it.
At least in terms LLMs getting all the "AI" hype these days, there is no structural/mathematical reason to believe they won't continue to have the same problem they've always had of generating plausible text over rational text, and I don't think anybody even has a clear idea how it could eventually be accomplished.
I've seen "then the magic singularity occurs and somehow it solves the problem for itself", but I would classify that more as mysticism than engineering.
> but it is very productive in terms of hundreds of proofs being produced that had previously consumed uncountable hours of the brightest minds
You’re making the following assumptions:
1. the exercise of struggling to find proofs was not productive, but this is precisely how new techniques in math were produced. Brute forcing solutions doesn’t lend itself to the creation of much new mathematics (except maybe the exercise of developing verifiable proofs)
2. the point of doing mathematics is to be “productive” in the first place. This is silly. Many people get into mathematics because of the beauty of understanding, for example.
> One is that AI will continue hallucinating in a manner that is not easy to verify, second is that AI will not be enhanced to produced more simplified amd robust outputs, and third that a human will be required to do that.
There is literally not a single shred of evidence to indicate either of your supposed eventualities. The core technology of an LLM is sampling from a distribution so there is literally no way to make it deterministically robust (only probabilistically).
Expression of tech-faith is not intellectually honest argument.
Where does this "will probably not hold in the very near future" come from? People correctly warn about extrapolating current things onto the future, but then just throw some vague "probabilities" without providing any argument why their "probably" is somehow more grounded than others.
Did you even RTFA? His argument absolutely doesn't make any assumptions about hallucinations, implicit or not. It's you who assumes Tao must have surely been complaining about hallucinations or some such. You've not addressed any of his arguments and moreover ask questions his post answers.
In TFA I read (scroll up from the link anchor) this was explained: OpenAI are not giving talks - because they can't answer any questions about the model's work. There is little follow-up activity - the actual elaboration of human understanding of the new ideas is stifled since the problem is solved.
But you are right, this is not OpenAI's "fault". The problem is - as others have said recently - that many people in mathematics want recognition for solving open questions more than they want the answers to the open questions. Everything about the economics and social environment of Mathematics will have to change.
I think that this is exactly the same split we see in software: there are those who mainly enjoy the craft aspect of building software, and are uninterested in the product or business they are supporting. Others are primarily interested in the production of useful software or building a platform or company.
I've always been in both camps myself. When it became obvious that AI was going to destroy the craft aspect - at least two years before it actually could do so - I became very discouraged, even depressed. But once it was actually good at building software, I became very excited about all the stuff I could now build. Sadly, I think a lot of people in our field have never had something they really wanted to build.
I'm in the same boat, I guess I had this naive idea that unsolved math problems would mean something if they were solved. But it seems like a lot of them at least were more thought experiments than anything else.
Perhaps mathematics was never about proving things? I know it sounds like moving the goal post, and it certainly was what motivated mathematicians on a day-to-day basis, but bear with me for a moment. I think that beyond being a creative activity that humans enjoy, math was about building new tools and systems of thought. Axiomizing things we take for granted, logic, linear algebra and calculus (on which modern LLMs rely so heavily) are such examples. People chose to participate in this field because they found it enjoyable and satisfying in some way. As a side effect, society reaped the benefits every couple of centuries. Will harvesting open problems with AI ever give us these things, or will we just be left laundry pile of Lean formalizations?
What does it mean to “genuinely” contribute to mathematics? Because the definition you use is load-bearing ;) and it might be different from that of others.
Because they published a ton of slop papers with terrible English, impossible for humans (even experts) to understand, full of non-standard terms, invented jargon etc.
So effectively, stuff got proved, but people don't really understand how, so it's mostly fucking useless and done for OpenAI's marketing team, while also pissing off the maths world at large.
The biggest problem is LLM tends to produce over engineered, very complicated proofs that are an eyesore even for relatively simple problems. Give it a beautiful Olympiad geometry problem and LLM will tear it apart into ugly algebraic calculations, turns all lines and circles into equations and calculate their intersection points that spans multiple pages because it is a guaranteed way to solve it. Correct, but hardly any use to the user.
I’m not deep in to math but the op tweets make sense to me. In that it’s not just the final proof that mattered, but the mind and understanding of the person who arrived at the answer. An LLM dumping the answer can’t elaborate on it, can’t tell the story of how they got there, etc. But it also deprives someone else of that achievement and learning.
The other gap in AI is it doesn't explain or lay out how it got to the final proof which is often more fruitful for new techniques etc than the final proof by itself.
> simply dumping proofs on the math community and expecting others to do the grunt work of verifying, refining, and expanding on them is hardly a productive way to advance the field.
I tend to agree with this, but what is the alternative? Should OpenAI and Anthropic employ hundreds of mathematicians to do this work? Should they just not solve math problems within their reach?
It's unclear what more could be expected than releasing the presumably already verified results and write-ups for each problem. Should they run a mathematics school too?
Then the comment goes on to argue AI labs were not interested in actually advancing mathematics, and that investments into AI were manically excessive.
IMO none of this follows and demand is there to justify the investments.
The comment then goes further to argue that AI labs were putting too much effort into pretending there was exponential progress rather than actually making progress.
The factual basis for this claim seems to be that OpenAI released math results and write-ups, and it's not even clear what more they could do on that topic.
Look at how actual researchers are currently using the tools: they'll generally use the LLMs to create slop papers, sometimes supported by auto-formalizations, just like OpenAI does. Then they will go through the lengthy process of digesting the results, turning the often incomprehensible and poorly organised outputs into something that humans can understand and build upon, they will then give seminars on the results, further helping with dissemination. Doing so still requires expertise, and probably will for a good while.
So yes, that is exactly what they should do. Alternatively, if they are too lazy or incompetent to put in the effort themselves, do what AGMAI proposed and fund a third party to help out.
Right, easy comparison to make the the open source community for software.
And it's not like this is something where we're loaned some top math genius for a limited amount of time and we have to make the most of it. Rather, this is a new high water mark. The accessibility of the results is no longer scarce. The scarcity has shifted, and that's where the focus of the math ecosystem should shift as well. And it doesn't help for a frontier community to saturate and take over messaging pipelines that were typically managed by the math ecosystem. It's not about "stay in your lane" but rather "we need coherence and be careful not to break the system."
Just two cents from someone who could screw up basic cashier math on any given day.
As with any field, convincing people to care about your ideas and your approach is half the battle
Many of the best startup ideas by the best product and engineering minds failed to gain attention and funding. Same with much of the best music - relegated to hard drives with derivative ideas only resurfaced decades later
I would expect much of the recent math dump will be leveraged by other LLM-driven research teams rather than read in depth by a human
I think a problem is that math seems like a deeply toxic, ego driven domain.
I think he argued that e.g because the navier stokes millennium problem ist considered solved now, you won't get any recognition for being the first human to solve.(How would you even proof you solved it yourself and not just regurgitated the ai proof?)
And since recognition is the main objective, noone would spend time on dissecting the proof, and perhaps finding some unique approach to solving the problem, that could be transferred to other open issues.
And therefore the problem is now "poisoned". Since it's assumed to be solved noone will research it, and the potential revelations won't be found
I think it's quite clear the mathematics panel didn't read most of the papers with the scrutiny it would take to publish it, if only because the lean certificates and the informal proofs are not 100% the same.
And if it's hard to understand (which seems to be the most common reaction) it's not exactly devoid of noise either
There was an opportunity for people to work with the AI to produce a proof, now it almost feels they're working against it.
> Too much effort is being invested in proving that the exponential curve is still holding.
Given sustained exponential growth is mathematically impossible to maintain with finite resources, it's funny to me they're using advanced mathematics to try and achieve this.
Once LLMs pass the threshold to being to invent new general-purpose methods and frameworks, the frontier is irreversibly lost to AI and it becomes simply a hobby that mathematicians pursue. They work through, digest, and maybe write up the proofs for understanding. But the real meat will be growing the LLMs. Who knew software eats the world was so true?
> but simply dumping proofs on the math community and expecting others to do the grunt work of verifying, refining, and expanding on them is hardly a productive way to advance the field
This is a transitive period. In a few years, verification and exchange between model instances will happen faster than humans can follow. Human input will be an ethical question, and not a productivity one, because it will be the bottleneck in any science.
Etic is a factor of productivity, and the larger the contextual window is the weightier it becomes. That’s even integrated within the paperclip parabola.
If the focus in placed on maximizing some easily measurable output on a narrow perspective, situation is unlikely going to match a sweet spot of holistic equilibrium which is maximizing harmony and happiness through humanity as a whole.
If math is just about having a community of other mathematicians to hang out with, it still isn't a career. Nobody is paying money you need in order to to eat, just to hang out in a community.
Just like a software engineer, "Well AI can write all my projects now, but I have my local Rust Users Group to hang out with". Nobody is paying me to hang out and hand code Rust.
That seems short sighted though. A few years ago models couldn't do this at all, I'm not sure there's any evidence to suggest exploring and refining results is outside their capabilities or will remain so.
OAI obviously have a fiscal incentive here, but to presume a year from now we won't see improvements and more succinct work on the results coming from models?
The problem is that one a person writes a 60 page proof in theory that person has spent an inordinate amount of time on the proof and can answer questions, describe some insight, etc etc.
If a random person is given a 60 page proof to digest and not the author, those hidden insights that _aren't_ in the paper might be completely inaccessible. Maybe the AI will "just" be able to provide the insights. Maybe. But pedagogy is tricky work, and despite these AIs being able to do all this fancy math we can't get them to write good cover letters yet, so....
Ultimately we might be left with just a bunch of intellectually unsatisfying proofs. This means way less drive to simplify the proofs or rework them.
End result: we generate a layer of "less efficient" mathematics, that won't get built upon. We will not actually have any shoulders upon which to stand.
> I'm not sure there's any evidence to suggest exploring and refining results is outside their capabilities
OP didn’t suggest that.
The bar has been raised. Everyone has to meet it now. An inelegant solution squatted onto the internet doesn’t count as discovery per se, even if it’s impressive.
> There seems to be more interest in hitting some arbitrary benchmark (we proved X unsolved problems) than in genuinely contributing to mathematics
I feel the same way about academia, the papers, the citations, the ego, the narcissism and the taxpayer codependency that got cut off and turns out wasn’t necessary at all thanks to a private sector entity running laps around them
I don’t feel that academics need to pursue the discipline and distributed brain-wracking that has sometimes resulted in the solved math problems, just because more times they find other nooks and crannies to explore along the way. I think the blueprint is enough. Standing on the shoulders of giants is good enough.
and if the concern is that they can’t figure out what to do with a proof, next year’s AI will
Proofs are valuable but I believe the mathematical community values understanding more. Proofs were previously a great way to develop understanding. Now, less so.
Not an expert, but explaining the proof and it being independently verifiable as important as just putting a paper of it. Reminds me of 1000 page proof of Goldbach’s conjecture that a Mathematician reached sometime back. He was told plainly that no one is going to invest time in verifying the proof because there’s a good chance there’s an error somewhere in between.
Proofs of open problems are valuable because we are assuming that proving the problem requires some new method or infrastructure in math to prove it. Basically proving open problems isn't actually useful if it doesn't develop new tooling for mathematics, which can help us create new open problems, solve other ones etc.
I recommend RTFA, it explains exactly that: why proofs should not be considered the goalpost, and why dumping all these AI-generated proofs might be an overall negative for mathematics as a whole.
Those few thousand mathematicians are now getting a taste of their own medicine. After all, it was people with extraordinary mathematical talent who developed machine learning and large language models, leaving hundreds of millions of people who earn their living through speaking, writing, or teaching worried about their future job prospects.
Still, I believe almost everyone will be fine. Perhaps AI will also prove good at coming up with new conjectures, and some mathematicians may shift towards applied mathematics or other sciences.
This Math 1.0 followed by Math 2.0 framing is wrong. Mathematics did not start a few decades ago when problem solving became the norm. And it will not end now when problem solving turns out to be "easy".
Mathematics will revert to it's main practice, which is to study.
There are lots of weird panic reactions by some prominent problem solvers. See for example the ridiculous cease and desist like statement of AHM shared at Tao blog.
Put this Math 1-2.0 with that AHM statement together and you'll realize that this is a power struggle and that you see only one side of it.
Mathematicians have very diverse opinions about this. I, for example, am for as much as possible automatic harvesting of all these "low hanging" fruits. Should be disclosed as soon as possible, free of any bottleneck, and citable. The mathematics community may do whatever its various members desire to do with these results. Let them decide individually what to do with them. This AI tool is here to stay.
The future of "math" is not just solving, but communicating what was solved, and why that solving is important. "Math" as a discipline is only ever been half created, they abandoned explaining themselves like it was beneath them. Well, now in "Math 1.0 finally whole" they will be explaining what they did to the rest of us. If you can't explain you are not really there.
That's what math has always been about, even if not everyone is necessarily as talented a communicator as someone like Thurston -- who was himself an exponent of computational tools in math research:
>I think of mathematics as having a large component of psychology, because of its strong dependence on human minds. Dehumanized mathematics would be more like computer code, which is very different. Mathematical ideas, even simple ideas, are often hard to transplant from mind to mind....Translation in the direction conceptual -> concrete and symbolic is much easier than translation in the reverse direction, and symbolic forms often replaces the conceptual forms of understanding....
This is an entitled take. The usefulness of a thing has nothing to do with how easily communicable it is. That is the whole premise of specialization and becoming an expert. People go in-depth on things so they can say “trust me on this” and so you don’t have to. You are advocating for a tyranny of the illiterate.
Also, this reads like you didn’t like math classes. That sucks, but it’s no basis for societal organization
I am advocating for effective communications, it is not as if knowledge once understood remains difficult. To communicate and convey understanding is good, and to withhold understanding is tyranny.
The authors of the proof are invited to give many talks, and meet with other experts in the area. Workshops are set up to discuss the proof, as well as other recent developments.
problems are being solved autonomously by AI prompters who have no interest in the broader field itself once their initial target is "solved", and do not understand the AI output well enough to answer questions on the result
The value here seems to be the insights that the author of the proof gained, and the paths they took and maybe more importantly didn't take.
Inviting only the human prompter to a talk on the paper is like inviting only the department chair, manager of the actual author.
The valuable part that Tao is feeling the absence of is the insight, and you can only get that from talking to the swarm of agents that developed the original proof with all of their context.
So to me it feels like we don't need Math 2.0, but Authorship 2.0. I want to "meet" the context that generated these proofs. I mean luckily these were not generated by faceless systems like a SAT solver, you can actually talk to it, but I'm not sure if we can step beyond our pride and grant the true authors of these proofs that recognition.
These systems don't have a genuine capacity of introspection, beyond just mining the conversation trace. When you're asking them why they did this or that, they are basically guessing anew from the outside, and are just as likely to hallucinate as they are to hit the right answer. These are mechanical systems which brute-force chains of various (re)combinations of techniques acquired from the training data. The true authors are all those who have contributed those techniques in the past.
I think that's debatable. Anthropic's interpretability research suggest models do have self-introspection ability, at least in the "J-Space": https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/ ; and this private working/'introspection' space is distinct and distinguishable from the tokens they output (CoT tokens are output too).
This was how it was done in chemistry back in the day: release a cooking instruction. If it fails, visit the colleagues and give hints on what you meant.
The idea would be that you should not fiddle with the minds who try to independently evaluate your works, so that is not a feasible approach to truth seeking.
While in organic chemistry, this way, valid progress was made, you can always avoid a perpetuum mobile inventor and get conned.
The problem is that the reasoning traces are kept secret. OpenAI doesn't publish them because it would lead to distillation attacks from other AI companies.
> problems are being solved autonomously by AI prompters who have no interest in the broader field itself once their initial target is "solved"
This is pretty much what a person that proivded patronage to a matematician used to be. API prompters are people who provide patronage for AI mathematicians.
You don't talk with them about the discoveries. About discoveries you should talk with who actually made them. Namely the LLMs.
Another analogy might by that you shouldn't expect to have interesting discussion about the essence of art with art producer.
Just thank them for the inference they covered and interact with the results instead.
Pure mathematics, in my view, is not science, not craft - it is art.
AI, however powerful, is a tool, only as important as the amount it helps mathematicians. Creating mathematics without human understanding is as sound as mass producing copies of Michelangelo David.
“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture [...] yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.”
- Bertrand Russell, "From The Study of Mathematics" (1902)
“A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. [...] The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.”
- G. H. Hardy, "A Mathematician's Apology" (1940)
The same could be said of Software. Instead of giving up on creating novel projects and instead just taking other peoples ideas and porting them to Rust, we could be embracing AI to push software and computers farther.
Im not sure how that will work, but im convinced the current paradigm of just pushing agents into codebases for not much reason other than you can is going to make building software incredibly boring and push creative people away from the field and stagnate progress.
My prediction is software gets boring and building hardware projects will be the new frontier for creative engineers looking to push computing further. Which is probably a good thing.
Originally the word computer described a person doing the act of computation.
I believe in the future, we're going to see a similar shift in "programmer" - instead of a human programming the computer, you'll give the ai an idea and it will spit out a program.
And just like how automating the act of computation revolutionized what we could compute, automating the act of writing code will change the act of programming - hopefully, as you described, allowing us to do things that simply were not practical in the past.
People wrote many books about software engineering, all from valuable experience from buildng expensive software systems. But in the age of AI, is there still anything learnable from generated code?
Personally I always ask AI to summarize its findings and lessons in a .md file. And I always learn something from it.
But could AI utilize some new patterns and paradigms I wasn't aware of? Very likely. Because we only learn from our personal grave mistakes, a summary from others gets neglected and forgotten
Sort of. An elegant proof is useful beyond what it shows. It hints at new mathematics, and can prompt discovery in applied fields. I don’t think I’ve heard of elegant code leading to discovery on its own.
I think this happens all the time actually, but it's often smaller scale. Like someone writes a neat architecture to do X at their company, and later someone else walks in, looks at this code and sees it's now super easy to do Y, which then turns out to have immense user/business value.
> I don’t think I’ve heard of elegant code leading to discovery on its own.
I’ve not heard of it either, but code is an abstraction of math, so I don’t see why this couldn’t theoretically happen.
Anecdotally, I’ve started spending time advancing my math skills beyond the early college level I stopped at and I’ve frequently found I already know concepts of more advanced math - I just didn’t know what they were called or how to apply them to an equation on paper, but I’ve been using them for years and intrinsically grasped the underlying academics.
I do agree with you, although I think that there may be still some advancement available in software in terms of programming languages or novel architecture design. But frontier is much more around hardware, just thinking about computing power, electrical transmission, material constraints on power, connectivity, insulation. I would definitely advise kids to study physics and materials engineering than CS.
I mean if we're being honest, most of CS studying (as practiced) was a waste of time anyway.
The S fell short in actual reality for the most part, as it was merely a hiring requirement. A hiring requirement that didn't even make sense, because the skillset of academic CS only marginally overlaps with the skillset one wants to hire for.
Material engineering at least for the most part has actual real-world applications where one can push humanity further. CS (as practiced, not necessarily the idea of real CS but the CS we got due to it being used as a hiring filter) for the most part is just self-referential spinning with mostly unclear results.
There is real impressive work being done in that field, of course, but I'd argue that the majority of it over the last decade or so at least was just performative nonsense.
Maybe by again allocating new resources to other fields, what hides under the label CS can become more pure actual CS again. I think that would also be a much less miserable experience for everyone involved.
Models have limits too, I don't think software will become boring. I think it'll become more interesting, in the not so distant future one software engineer will be able to do so much more than today.
What new things are even left to discover in software? You can still use C for all the backend stuff and I don’t think all the endless stream of front end frameworks and libraries are all that innovative. I think the only tangible innovations we’ve made over the last few decades have been in infrastructure management. All heavy lifting is done by mathematics anyways.
>the mere knowledge that a solution exists "contaminates" efforts by both humans and AI to find alternate routes to the problem that reveal additional insights
This really expresses the heartburn you see across all fields, not exclusive to careerism. I certainly have friends in decomp and fan translation spaces that have been demotivated by the current rash of efforts happening there.
The rush to be "first" has always been over-celebrated, but it would be nice to believe there's a way to get beyond that thinking.
This has already been the case in AI/ML and computer vision papers via flag planting papers. Have an idea, super quickly publish a hasty work based on it that doest actually work, methodological and eval issues, engineering terrible, slow, bad results etc. But it was the first so now your concurrent work that was much better evaluated, better implemented, etc is suddenly worthless and unpublishable.
Byte-matching has been a side-effect of gaining an understanding of how the software works. With this you are skipping the understanding and you will not get people like Kaze Emanuar on YouTube who have dedicated a lot of time to building upon this understanding to create something better.
I don't think it's motivating to solve a black box by having AI generate another black box if what you want is to understand how the thing worked.
If your goal was to do something for the games you love and understand them on a deeper level, then just handing that off to an LLM doesn't really give you the same sense of accomplishment.
Why were we doing math in the first place? We should be happy that math problems were being solved, since presumably they were blockers for other problems in science and the like. But it feels like math was really more about seeking enlightenment, like a form of mental yoga or something. If so, we can just ignore AI proofs and continue on maybe?
There’s a somewhat famous lecture [0] by Wigner (one of the greats of 20th century physics if you’re not familiar) on exactly this topic. One of his points is that new tools and ways of thinking developed on the way to solving mathematical problems with no apparent application often find downstream applications in science and engineering. If we’re skipping the part where we identify and understand the new math, will we still reap the unreasonable effectiveness? Tao’s position in this post suggests that the current wave of LLM successes is not conducive to this dynamic
I'm a retired AI researcher and I still enjoy programming. However, I don't use any however assistance as I still want the thrill of learning new things. Unfortunately, it appears that the only way for most developers to enjoy similar activities is to be retired with enough money
This is exactly why half the conversation conversations about AI eventually become a critique of capitalism. AI isn’t for fun or joy, it’s explicitly for business use. For replacing people. For extracting more out of each worker. That’s all the major companies (OAI, Anthropic, etc) are offering. None of this is designed to give us any more freedom or time to pursue the things we are passionate about.
I feel like we’re circling back to that 2010s energy of “everyone can be an entrepreneur.” Now it’s “everyone can build software”
If you're considering an individual, maybe this makes sense.
But if you're consdiering a community, this falls apart. The maths community has universities, has professors who are paid, has students which are getting their degrees for varying reasons, it has conferences, has publications, papers, projects etc etc, all of which will get some negative impact some AI.
You know that line "when a measurement becomes a target it ceases to be a useful measurement". This line holds up to different degrees for various measurements and targets. For maths it holds up very well. The goal is "contribute to make the world better by increasing humanity's understanding of maths" and the measurement, which by evaluating an individual on it we're turning into a target, is "how much does the individual publish new findings". Measurement turned target holds up great. It's almost impossible to publish new findings and not contribute to humanity's understanding of maths. But with AI these two are being decoupled. You can produce lots of new findings, but the community is saturated and they don't get assimilated into humanity's understanding. Why do individuals use AI then? Because you've made the target "how much does the individual publish new findings" and they have to compete or lose.
If a coal miner or car mechanic would say something like this, they would be called a luddite by the same science people.
Its different when your own job is on the line.
When human manual arts were being automated away it was supposed to be not only acceptable but any complain and you were told you were a progress blocking luddite.
Now that mental labor is getting automated, the response to automation is very different.
To many professional mathematicians it's a form of art. But at the end of the day, it's a profession done for money, and even if they like doing it as a day to day job, they'd probably be doing something else if they had absolute freedom over their time. This is how I personally classify things as art or chore. If people continue doing something the same way when there is no financial motive, it's art in its pure form.
Based on the research mathematicians I have known, I'd disagree with 'they'd probably be doing something else if they had absolute freedom over their time' for at least a large number of them, although it probably varies from individual to individual.
If we're going to be frank about it, higher level math is:
1) Intellectually challenging, to such a degree that those wishing to enter the field need to have a certain level of intellectual prowess to do so. This creates some levels of mystique, with a sprinkle of elitism and gatekeeping.
2) Driven (among other things) by prestige. And the more pure the math is, the more prestigious it is.
3) So complex that people can spend their entire working careers chasing a handful of problems. The amount of time researchers spend on very specific problems is mind-boggling, if we think about the results.
4) Intensely captivating for the people deep in the weeds.
And the deeper you get, the longer you study, the more you start to value things like "mathematical beauty", and may start to view math as a form of art.
Like many similar fields, you end up with this ivory tower where people can dedicate their whole lives to thinking deeply about extremely niche and theoretical problems.
Similar things are happening in the competitive programming world.
Quite a lot of people are not happy they aren't elite anymore, and many have spent years to decades to arrive here.
Simply put you invest years of your life to establish a kind of distinction over others, and that goes away. That hurts.
But its not something surprising. Most of these competitive programming problems were actually English languages puzzles, because you couldn't dial up the mathematical difficulty anymore making it a fields medal problem. And in most cases in simple language weren't even that hard to begin with, and you could look up solutions to these problems in an hour of Google searching.
I think this focus on a "holistic" approach applies to everything AI is touching now, not just math. On Twitter I see people one-shotting games, or reproducing games. If the goal is to just one-shot a game using AI, it's done. But if the goal is to produce immersive medium that people can truly enjoy, admire the story and the craftsmanship, and can find entire new ways of bringing a story to life, that's something else entirely.
The dynamics of software are vastly different from manufactured goods though. Software can be distributed at essentially zero cost so the disposable crap analogy breaks down.
Like given the choice, the vast majority of people would prefer one quality game like Minecraft, LoL, or Fortnite, vs. thousands of one-shot generated games, and looking at user playtime this is exactly what we see. If anything AI is just going to entrench these pre-AI franchises even more.
I don't think they prefer it, but the price is a deciding factor.
Most people would be happier with La Marzocco coffe machines which costs thousands of dollars, but if you get an OK shot with a 100 USD DeLongi, then the choice is clear for majority of the population.
I don't think this is really true for games, a lot of games have enormous resources thrown at their development and marketing and they fall flat because they simply aren't very fun. Then we have a million slop games that sell 3 copies on steam, and in practice only the most unique/fun/addictive games can break through.
I, for one, am profoundly thankful that the ~300 year mania around innovation and newness is beginning to wane. You don't need to read that many history books to appreciate that the values that we have today are profoundly different than what they were previously. It takes a few more books, and a pinch of humility, to appreciate that today's values are neither universal nor the necessary outcome of a teleological evolutionary process. The reworking that Tao suggests here reaches far beyond math. The fact that mathematicians are starting to wrestle with these questions is cause for great optimism. Once VCs do the same thing, we'll be on the other side of the storm.
I hope Terry has somewhere private where he can safely express his anger at how poorly math has been treated by these AI corps. I understand that as a recently pro-AI public figure he is limited to ambivalence, so I understand him adding caveats like “maybe math 2.0 has a place for AI”, but it can’t feel good to say stuff like that just days after OpenAI so drastically salted the earth.
Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? They somehow invented a way of solving an open problem without advancing the field. That’s something that mathematicians had never even thought was possible. And while the mathematicians were beginning the great conversation to re-examine their fundamental understanding of the pursuit of math in light of this new phenomenon, OpenAI decided they would do it again 372 more times.
What a disingenuous, willfully ignorant take. None of these AI companies have been acting in good faith or in any way other than grotesque self-aggrandizement to the expense of everyone else.
Stupid, but could be fun: grants are given for how amusing your proposed prompts are.
Everyone should have a portfolio of prompts that are indecipherable by other humans but when fed to a frontier model, produces shocking one paragraph english version of a 10000 line lean proof
He is right, I think this would be a good direction for sectors and careers that are at risk of becoming redundant.
I love smart people like this; even when there's a threat, instead of just being in denial or boycotting out of anger, they figure out a new path for their community
I said this when OpenAI announced they had solved a Millennium prize problem: solving open problems for the sake of it will lose its cachet. AI companies will no longer benefit by making these announcements. They've proven the effectiveness of their tool. If people want to use them to advance human knowledge then let them do that. There's no benefit to humanity to turn electricity into proofs just for the sake of it.
It's not just about proving the benefit of the tool, it's about proving that the latest version of the tool is better than the previous version and of the competitors' latest versions
In this case though the compute per problem was pretty reasonable so if this model was available this rate of progress would mostly continue whether OpenAI funds it or not.
Even when a problem got solved, there has always been value in publishing simpler proofs and corollaries that give better intuition into the broader field.
If I understand Tao correctly, he's saying that's going to have to be the focus going forward. I just default to thinking the models are going to be much better than us at that, too.
> the models are going to be much better than us at that, too.
I wonder if this is true. The code produced by these models are not really getting any more elegant over time. On contrary, the models seem to be getting worse, often proposing really baroque architectures. You can use RL to optimize for correctness, optimizing the vibe seems much more difficult.
For deeper complexity, elegance may turn out to be a hindrance. Better or worse may turn out to be descriptive of taste and nothing else. On the other hand, elegant alternatives might be brought into reach by this first messy contact with new ideas. Who can say at this stage?
Studies have figured out how many 'concepts' or 'chunks' of information a typical human brain can hold in working memory. The famous 7±2 is a common way this is expressed. This research has been disputed and further nuanced (I know, I know, replication crisis...), but for the sake of argument, assume that there is some cognitive limit to how much information we can hold in our heads at once.
In the beginning, calculus as invented by Newton used complex ruler and compass constructions. Newton had a high cognitive capacity, so it was understandable to Newton. It took mathematicians coming later, including Leibniz, to turn this technique into a body of work that fits more easily into the average human mind. Newton and Leibniz independently developed calculus, but Leibniz's notation and formalism in particular provided a much more compact way of expressing and manipulating the ideas of calculus.
Open up Spivak at any page and find a formula; you should probably find that it contains 7±2 'things'. Like an integral, say: the integral sign, lower and upper limits, the function inside, the variable of integration. Then the theory and the rules for transforming these expressions was created so that working with calculus becomes mostly a set of rote operations.
Now a 1st-year student can do more calculus in a week than Newton even could have done in a year.
Now imagine aliens land on the Earth which have 10x our cognitive capacity, and we ask them about their mathematics. It would probably be incomprehensible to us because it would not have gone through a cognitive bottleneck sufficiently small to force it to fit into our minds. They might be totally happy with a mathematical expression containing 700 'things.'
We now find ourselves in this situation, except the alien is an AI we created.
I believe a cognitive bottleneck needs to be maintained so that maths can still remain human maths.
EDIT: Basically, mathematical elegance is finding a representation which allows irrelevant detail to dissapear.
Einstein did not typically use the formal peer review system to "settle on published work." Almost all of his major papers (including his landmark 1905 Annus Mirabilis papers) were published directly by journal editors without formal peer review.
When Physical Review sent his 1936 draft to a referee, Einstein was so outraged that he withdrew the paper and vowed never to publish with the journal again. He corrected his math only after an informal, friendly discussion with colleague Howard Percy Robertson—who, unbeknownst to Einstein, was the anonymous reviewer.
It is surprisingly similar to "Catching crumbs from the table" by Ted Chiang, a sci-fi perspective published in Nature in 2000, https://www.nature.com/articles/35014679
What should OpenAI have done instead of what they did? I think it’s far better that we get the messy dump of proofs ASAP so everyone can grapple with the reality of what these models can and can’t do, and participate in figuring out where things go from here.
What would a more “responsible” approach have been?
For each paper they think they have, reach out to mathematicians working in the relevant area to find ones willing to take on the role of advisor, co-author, reviewers, etc. Basically just follow the same process that a postdoc would to publish a paper.
You're just moving the problem around. Instead of OpenAI and Anthropic dumping proofs, you'd instead have someone (maybe an aspiring graduate student, maybe a hobbyist, maybe an established mathematician who has disdain for existing process) dump these proofs en masse personally.
My understanding is that top tier math programs don't hire based on journal pubs and haven't for a bit. Math journals are pretty slow and hiring is really via reputation building based on one or two big wow ideas / proofs propogated via arxiv and talks.
This is basically On proof and progress in mathematics by Thurston restated. When Thurston wrote it in 1994, many people didn't understand what he is talking about.
And already on page 2 Thurston cuts the the root of the issue, 30 years ago:
>On a more everyday level, it is common for people first starting to grapple with
computers to make large-scale computations of things they might have done on a
smaller scale by hand. They might print out a table of the first 10,000 primes,
only to find that their printout isn’t something they really wanted after all. They
discover by this kind of experience that what they really want is usually not some
collection of “answers”—what they want is understanding.
The difference in reactions by the maths community should probably be spit up into those who have read and understood On Proof and Progress and actually thought deeply about why they do mathematics, and those who haven't.
> But at the current time, the opposite is often occurring: problems are being solved autonomously by AI prompters who have no interest in the broader field itself once their initial target is "solved", and do not understand the AI output well enough to answer questions on the result, give talks, or otherwise interact with the rest of the field.
Sounds like Terence Tao would have said the same about Ramanujan who basically just "solved" problems without much explanation / reasoning / communication other than it just arrived from god.
In the case of Ramanujan, others took on the responsibility of socializing and community building knowing that he wouldn't do it himself. Why can't the same approach happen here?
There will be people who want to just "solve" math problems now that they have a new tool that lets them express themselves this way. Maybe the don't want to participate in the broader math community, etc. Why discourage them, or add friction / a barrier to them participating in their own way? Why not take on the burden of socializing, making sense of, and community building yourself?
There may be valid reasons here I'm missing, but to me this seems a bit like wanting others to approach a field in a particular way even though the field can support many ways.
He would never say that because Ramanujan was the one who had the insight that he couldn't explain, not a machine. If a machine solves the problem, then the machine deserves the credit, not the person who prompted it.
My university math teacher considered his job done when he showed me the proof. He literally said "I gave you the proof, what more do you want?". That was the end of my math education.
So, now he can join the club. The AI gave him the proof, what more does he want?
Math? Everyone is talking about math, with math-centric discussions and solutions. I think the obsession with math is simply to distract ourselves from the fact that it's coming for all of us.
None of these essays even remotely consider it. Denial is a helluva drug.
Does this response properly anticipate how math will change further with the next N model generations? Exposition and exploration may fall well within the capabilities of future models.
These posts came shortly before the math release by OpenAI. I hope the continued discussion of the goldmines in their release helps clarify a vision for how to proceed.
This is a distilled version of what people say about the tech industry in the past year or so. Replace math with any field, and the statement is still relevant.
I don't think it's that simple. I divide AI-impacted fields into three buckets:
1. Some present a unified line that the whole point of their craft is the human experience, and that automation is the antithesis of that. Marathon runners don't care that a car can get there faster, poets don't care that Poem Bot 2000 can write poems too. I think this is smart if you can credibly take this position. The difficulty is mostly convincing the buy side, which requires being very outspoken about your views.
2. Some appear to be undecided, with one faction taking the pro-human stance and another rushing to accelerate things with AI. A good example of this is mathematics, and I really wonder where they end up in the long haul. They have a very good claim on #1, because mathematics is pretty close to an art form and is robustly insulated from the pressures of the marketplace. But they can also choose option #3, below.
3. Some crafts prioritize results above all else, practitioners either rushing to extract as much money as possible before it all collapses, or believing that they can out-prompt everyone else forever and that their prompting skills are indispensable to their employers in the long haul. That's software engineering. I think this is going to be interesting to watch.
I don't think it's smart at all to position yourself in bucket 1.
There's a reason there are maybe a few hundred professional marathon runners in the world vs tens of thousands of professional mathematicians.
Bucket 1 is basically an "amusement for the upper classes" type of deal. Any field that goes in that direction would have to shrink down massively.
It also devalues the field in my opinion from something really profound with actual impact in the world to a somewhat vain leisure activity. (basically going back to gentleman scientists) But I know other people would see it exactly the opposite way.
I think your second bucket would need to be changed, as it's not really undecided for some and Tao in fact argues (in a way) that there is no need for the field to decide. There is a need for results, but there is also a need for humans to fully understand why the results are the way they are and how they were obtained. This doesn't replace the human in the loop it's more of a cooperative effort.
Seems like neat buckets but you may want to find one example for the first which can actually be done by an llm as running is not its strong suit afaik
OpenAI counterexample solves the millennium problem in a Yes/No manner - we do know in general that singularity could arise, but it still isn't solved in terms of "Why", ideally we could take an arbitrary physical problem and decide if Navier-Stokes equation can be applied to it.
This is similar to general solvability of the quintic equations - Abel provided a proof first but only with the advent of Gallois theory we could basically understand it in full and decide for any quinitic if it's solvable by radicals or no.
I think the real question is "can we apply these solutions?"
It is important that we stay focused - this is theatre. Incredibly impressive, but this doesn't yet show evidence of helping society, which is the whole reason we were doing this in the first place.
Stephenson’s Anathem solves some of these problems with cloistered groups (“maths”) that only interact on an epicyclic basis so that old wisdom becomes stabilized with new knowledge has supports for metabolization. I would enter a math.
When you mechanise, you take the "meaning" out of the effort and that, in of itself, is death of human pursuit of the venture.
The industrial revolution did that to battles and wars and it inspired Tolkein's lores to a considerable degree. He loathed what mechanisation had done.
I feel something similar is happening to Mathematics. I shudder to think what would come of other human pursuit this mechanisation targets next.
No, you're right. I clearly missed reading the room :D
But I'm glad how Terence Tao sees it. I was relying him to do that for the NS results as well.
I didn't follow through to the PhD, but I spent few years building up to understanding of Fluid Dynamics and Functional Analysis to come close to NS. It's intriguing that it's "solved", but what interests me is then "what do we learn from it" and what lies beyond in non-linearity.
In the 10 years I've spent away from academia, I still cherish what Math taught me best: looking at equivalences and I still feel the kick that I surely wouldn't want an Agent to do on my behalf. NS was never the point. And who can't see that I can only feel that they missed out.
Maybe, actually, it will rehumanize math by formulating its ideas in a manner that allow their comprehension without 10-15 years of mechanized practice. The average human might understand quantum mechanics and Maxwell’s equations with the right conceptual interface.
Maybe they should, you know.
Maybe OpenAI is exactly working towards so that we need to do that :)
It's fascinating how people like to push any statement to its limits, because it circles around to absurdity and they believe they've made a point. Moderation seems to be chasing you, but you clearly are faster!
I feel like OpenAI should have secretly contacted a bunch of mathematicians and offered to give them "credit" for these "discoveries" as long as they also credited ChatGPT with helping in research. Mutual interest etc.
I mean, he still seems to underestimate what future models will be able to do. The various directions he wants to reward are also things future models will do far better than humans. I suspect we're better suited to pursuing math like we do pleasure reading... it's enjoyable, can be useful in various situations, but we're clear-eyed that we're not gonna advance the field... and that's okay and doesn't mean it's not still worthwhile.
What's happening in the math field at the moment represents on a smaller scale the issue we (probably) will face when AI becomes smarter than us in general. Do we slow the AI down so we can understand what it does and if it's correct (and align with our values for bonus points); do we, humans, adjust the way we work to the new speed or do we give in and let the AI advance while we're not completely sure of what it does and the correctness of it.
The math field is in the position of showing us the way.
I think the bigger issue is that "we" won't be doing any deciding. A handful of oligarchs will. As the technology becomes better than us, I am afraid we will learn that we are (at least seen as) technology as well. And the owner of the better technology will decide what to do with the inferior technology. I don't see anyone trying to design the roads for horse carriages, so I don't understand why would anything change for humans' understanding.
That is, if things go in the current trajectory. I don't see any reason why anything would change though.
It is interesting to see that we are using this term Math 2.0 so quickly, after just a few months/year of seeming progress on previously hard problems, for something that has been around for thousands of years.
> "Math 2.0" will need to decenter the role of raw problem solving and value mathematical progress more holistically - for instance by elevating the role of exposition, but also that of community building and opening up new directions of study
It is interesting that AI is not yet superhuman at exposition, or at least exposition that can be understood by humans. But you haven't updated enough if you don't think that will happen soon. I'd also expect for AI to become superhuman at opening up new directions of study and theory building.
> Many fewer seminars, workshops, collaborations, or other activities are being generated from these results compared to traditional breakthroughs...the mere knowledge that a solution exists "contaminates" efforts by both humans and AI to find alternate routes to the problem that reveal additional insight
This is absurd. The mere knowledge contaminates...give me a break Tao! Of course having a (possible) solution changes how we're thinking about the problem. If that's what you mean by contaminate, fine. But if you're a person who's excited, curious, interested in mathematical knowledge for its own sake these AI results are a treasure trove. New approaches to old problems, some old approaches that we couldn't make work before. Why not whole seminars to take one of these results and dissect them, prompting the AIs to figure out where else we can use them, improving and simplifying, etc.
Look, I get Tao's anxiety. The ground is shifting and it's hard to solve for the equilibrium. How in the world do you write a grant proposal today when the person who will read it reads the headlines and thinks "math" is solved. That's something that the mathematical community will need to figure out over time. And it's possible that there'll less money for math research overall. When the marginal cost goes down, the market equilibrium changes (but don't forget Jevons paradox!). So I get the anxiety. I just expected better from some of the top people of the field.
Most of the problems that have been solved are problems on which a great deal of progress had already been made. Those who work on well known problems posed by famous people are those who suffer the most from this. Those who do their own thing and pose new problems, on the contrary, benefit from it. Suddenly raw technical power and great memory are not so valuable as a broad perspective, structural insight, and wild ideas. Who can be successful in this new ecosystem is different. Some of the elites are (correctly) more threatened by it than some "mid tier" mathematicians. I see lots of opportunities to overcome obstacles in my research program some of which had confounded me for years.
On the other hand, it puts a premium on resources. AI is not cheap for mathematicians. Folks are fancy universities in rich countries with forward thinking ministries of science will have an advantage over the rest.
What is clearly in immediate crisis is the traditional model of doctoral education. Most of the problems that were "given" to ordinary doctoral students are solvable (quickly) even by something like Claude pro. Mathematicians need to adopt training models more like what is done in experimental and laboratory sciences - collaborative and structured.
Where Tao is wrong is in regards to exposition. AI already writes better lecture notes, problems, and exercises for mid level undergrad math classes than do most of my colleagues. It's exposition is generally well structured and clear and it can adjust level on request quite well. It writes research better than most professional mathematicians too.
I wonder how we could formalize the notion of „interesting“ problems in a way that would allow us to automatically generate new interesting questions from the existing corpus of mathematics.
A simple way is to just measure how long it takes to solve. If it takes more than 5 minutes then we don't have a good understanding of that area and its worth potentially investing into.
This is wildly shortsighted view of mathematics. Historically many of the subfields of math which are presently most valuable were considered useless for decades or centuries. Number theory, non-Euclidean geometry, group theory, and Boolean algebra, to name a few.
I have this feeling that the frontier of maths is going to accelerate faster than humans can keep up with it, even if machines get exceptionally good at math exposition. There’ll be some event horizon of new discoveries which are so complex we’ll never understand their intermediate steps. Beyond that point, humans will revert to “Math 1.0”, where we’ll need to rediscover proofs that have already been solved by machines, and we’ll have a pair of frontiers each for the humans and the machines.
he put in an elegant way, that its not just about the solution it's about how we would leverage the AI for better good.
Which should improve collaboration, Research and Clarity.
I would really appreciate if we come up with protocols for using ai in STEM field's it might be award at first but we could regulate properly using this method.
Working heavily with LLMs for the past year has me nodding strongly with Tao's mindset.
AI only take us as far as our imagination thinks to ask it. This can be exhilarating when new models drop every month and we can continually reach a new threshold, basically for free. But it is only a one time gain and ultimately short-sighted. Where I find continuous value is using LLMs to help my understanding, full stop.
I use LLMs all day long as a SWE and I have tried many approaches, but the most satisfying and consistent approach is to lean heavily into understanding a problem space and a solution space. Yes, it whips up architecture and code, but I spend most of my time peppering it with questions about the design and how it handles certain situations, what about this edge case and that security concern and this future product need. I have it write a report breaking down the feature and how it integrates with existing code and if the report is too confusing I have it simplify either the report or the code until it makes sense to me, sometimes scaling back the work to a more manageable state. I do all of this before I look at any of the code it writes.
The difference from this approach is that I am not suffering reading through 3000 lines of AI slop but I am reviewing a PR that I fully understand. I can eyeball it quickly for anything that doesn't fit my mental model and dig deeper or quickly revise it. Only after I am happy with the bones do I consider the meat and skin of the code.
What I find most concerning is how frontier AI companies all seem to have this Math 1.0 perspective that they only want to type "solve Riemann" into the chat box and have the magic to happen. It is the same problem Google ran into, where a simple, no thinking solution serves most of the people best and most profitably, so you fully ignore or remove everything else (boolean operators, exact phrase search, verticals, filters, infinite pages of results, "nothing found" if there isn't, etc.) But that choice leads to the situation Google is in now, scrambling to stay relevant. In a different world, Google would have continuously augmented their search capabilities and eventually built a smooth, guidable AI interface.
But no, we must only have an input box and a Go button.
Everything looks like a nail when you build hammers, sell hammers, have infinite hammers to play with however you like and your company mission is to build a hammer starship to explore the hammerverse, whether or not that is even possible.
Strongly agree. I see the need to understand as back pressure on the system that produces code and features: it limits output to what fits into a working mental model. Agents could turn tickets into code much faster, but I am building a product, and it needs someone who holds that model to steer it long term.
And when the job is done, I run retrospectives on old coding-agent sessions to find areas of friction and confusion. I also journal with pen and paper, as it's supposed to bring cognitive benefits, to help me stay on top of things.
Hey, Civil Engineer here. Although I totally understand what our pure math friends are saying, I want to emphasize that the nature of math is interpreting and validating results, not doing the math. You may not be aware from the other side of your moat of very difficult or abstract concepts, but technology has been slowly removing friction and optimizing for efficiency for every other math user for a long time now. I understand that it's not fun to have AI do an aspect of your job better than you, but as perpetual students it's our job to turn the tools into progress. Also, I think that anyone standing on the "no AI in math" hill will die on it, and will die on it soon.
He is right if model intelligence stalls. If model intelligence continues to improve soon there's no need for the prompter to understand anything or for any workshop as a mathematician will just be able to ask the model to explain how the proof works and models will do a good job at walking them through it step by step.
There will be no gap in understanding. Now there is because the models are discovering things at the edge of what they can do and so suck at explaining it. There's nothing particularly special about a newly solved problem in terms of learning it.
If we accept AI can explain all of existing math nicely, why shouldn't it be able to explain new proofs?
I am not so sure that's true. Even if AI intelligence were to plateau at today's levels, there are still many gains to be had in speeding up today's intelligences. ASICs with burned in weights could become economical to invest in as they would retain usefulness longer than 18 months, and I feel we have only scratched the surface on possible usecases of local AI and what it means for almost any technology product or interface.
That doesn't make sense to me. Terence Tao is great at explaining things, but he could spend months explaining some of his proofs to me without me understanding it. Even if the AI had a superhuman ability to explain things it's no guarantee that it could make a human understand.
It couldn't make every human understand. But it could make Tao and other mathematicians understand. You're not going to become knowledgeable at everything suddenly, even though I doubt what you say. Many months of 1-1 tutoring and hard work from a student with a top mathematician would make you understand a lot. Just not sit down and read it first day.
It's been very interesting watching Tao's evolution on his thinking on LLMs. Of course the LLMs have themselves evolved so that shouldn't come as a surprise.
The job of professional mathematician might be the first to be completely eliminated by LLMs, save for those who can make money from a patron. I am hoping they are able to figure something out to save their profession, as other professions could use it as a blueprint as AI comes for them next.
> job of professional mathematician might be the first to be completely eliminated by LLMs
Strong disagree.
Do you work in a math adjacent field? I do and I find having a mathematician around invaluable.
It's like a non-software person writing software. Yes, using a LLM will get you to a solution that works. But just talking with a software engineer will make the quality of that solution enormously better.
I find the same with math - I can get something to work using an LLM, but if I speak to a mathematician they'll say some magic words to try and I put that in the LLM and it is "oh yes this is a much better solution".
This is very different work to generating proofs though. Its things like "I'm trying to get my confidence intervals to properly deal with census like sampling but at small sample sizes" (yes, I know stats not pure math but still..)
The main issue here is that people that are able to "Strong disagree" is shrinking with every model release, because it requires skills. So it will get more difficult to get funding.
You may say "hey, before AI people payed for math salaries even though they didnt understand the math or the economic outcome". But the issue is there are now "mathematitians" trying to convince not to fund.
In this new reality, you will get "mathematitians" trying to convince that only AI maths matter. And on the other side someone speaking about "understanding", "taste", "community". And the people deciding to fund dont have the skills to differentiate. So they will fund the AI boosters with a higher probability.
Thats how the job of professional mathematitian dissapears. By being replaced by something that on the surface looks similar, but its just an ugly copy.
After seeing the cancerous monster AI "proofs" it became obvious as day that we need better abstractions in several fields. The good part is: there is still a lot left to do for humans as they actually have the abstract thinking ability, as opposed to crazy cancerous token generation.
Curiously fitting that the Pope is also a Mathematician by training. I'd imagine he agrees with Tao on the fundamental aims of mathematical research and how these proof dumps largely miss the point
I imagine doctors will also clutch their pearls when Ai starts curing disease. "But curing disease was never the point! These arbitrary dumps of AI cures for cancers is unsustainable! Who will think of the doctors and who will build their communities further? From now on progress in medicine must be redefined as what makes doctors thrive, not what generates cures!"
That's a strong contender for the worst analogy I've ever seen on HN, and it's a crowded field.
Edit: If you'd like a better medicine based one, look to radiology, where AI is an omnipresent tool but claims that radiologists are no longer needed, based on an ignorant view that a radiologist's job is "classify images according to what diseases they indicate" have only contributed to a crippling worldwide shortage of radiologists.
I think the difference is that with cancer cures we mostly care that it works as proved by trials, and understanding it is a bonus.
Up until now the prize in pure (as opposed to applied) mathematics was the _understanding_ and the machine can't do that for you. What does it mean if we get "super powered alien maths" but humans can't do it? It's like inter univeral teichmuller theory but imagine if Mochizuki was right and it came with a lean proof?
It was the understanding for some, and the result for others. Math is going to bifurcate along those lines. Many are the builder type who use math for a purpose. To accelerate an algorithm, to improve the numerics or convergence of a computation, to verify statements about real things, to use it in angineering applications, etc etc.
In my view, over the last century, math has turned into an intellectual analogue of extreme bodybuilding competitions. A navel gazing runaway optimization in making useless stuff just to demonstrate cleverness. That's fine, why not. But society has no obligation to fund that, just as it doesn't fund other extreme hobbies. Ideally if we ever get something like UBI, math can be still their hobby.
Maybe AI will take over some roles of doctors, but that's independent of curing diseases. Think about diseases that have a cure - do people with those diseases not go see a doctor?
> And our community will need to explicitly re-evaluate its criteria for education, publication, and career advancement, to reflect the "Math 2.0" era.
I think most academic disciplines would benefit from such a re-evaluation. AI is still a scourge on the earth, but I suppose if it spurs such changes that's a modicum of a silver lining.
Can we please stop reducing human activity to "taste", conferences, talks, "understanding"? I think this is a very unproductive trap.
There is a world where we get to the edge of AI capabilities, and we build on top of that. As humans have always done with every new technology.
There is another more pessimistic view where LLMs just replace every human capability, and our economic overlords dont need us for anything and we just eat the small pieces of bread that are left.
This comes down to the fact of:
is human existence/intelligence just the simbolic representations we make in our brain? Or are they just a tool?
I tend to think of Godels incompleteness theorem as a proof that on the limit LLMs are useless. The real question for me is at what point approaching this limit becomes an issue, and if it has any practical consequences.
I know that is the whole point. But i may dream of being as tall as a house, but it does not matter how hard i dream, it wont happen.
In my experience, every new model release allows me to go further, although every time i see every time the limitations, and i identify where i add value. And this value gets bigger every time.
But on the other hand, every model release reduces the amount of people that are able to value this "added value", because it requires more skills.
So we have the paradox that the added value i can bring on top gets bigger and bigger, but the perception of the economic value for the majority of the population gets smaller.
I would argue the problem is not AI, but putting value on proofs by mathematics community. They're not fully to blame, part of it is need of billionaires (and other elites) to appear educated, and the general status culture that sees mathematics as something that needs to be socially justified.
Grigori Perelman warned about this when he refused the Millenium problem prize. He understood mathematics should be a journey, not a destination.
I think it's disappointing [1] for a group of people (however smart they are, whatever titles and fame they have) to think they are the gatekeepers of mathematics, the core of human knowledge. In this respect "mathematics is what mathematicians do" is no longer true, perhaps it was never a useful thing to say. Mathematics is (downstream) consumed in some shape or form by every human on Earth, and no elite, appointed group gets to decide how new mathematics is created. I feel this is a reaction to the sting of the reality check for these people, who are gifted with amazing genetics, and can think faster and deeper than other humans, that their gifts are relative to humans, and machines can still outdo them.. but this is already true for so many other areas, from physical strength to playing chess. Also, I feel this reaction is just non-sensical, it reminds me of when commercial software company CEOs [2] said open source is communism in the early 2000s, because they felt open source is threating their business model.
Lastly, deep down I don't really get what mathematicians are so upset about. All open problems, once solved, are not solved by 99.9999% of mathematicians, because it's solved by one or a handful of others, and the others just learn of the solution/proof. Mathematicians can now still organize conferences about these proofs, discuss them, digest them, think of new avenues of research, etc. They don't even have to invite OpenAI, in 6 months whatever model is available on chatgpt.com will be this smart anyway, and they can use it in the workshops for explanations, etc.
[1] I was going to write "I'm a bit disappointed by the response of the math community..", but then I remembered, whatever T. Tao writes is not the position of the math community, it's his position. Then I was going to write "I'm a bit disappointed by the response of T. Tao..", but then I remembered, I don't know Tao personally, so why am I disappointed?
""Math 1.0" placed a premium on being the first to solve an open problem, even if the solution was not initially well understood"
Arbitrary conclusion. This is the corporate take on "mathematics"
Mathematics were meant to further our understanding of nature and solve people's problem. Not to serve corporate delusional CEOs for their psychopathic purposes.
I get bonked for saying this again and again, because people get annoyed with an oversimplified analogy or the use of whateverfallacy,
but can someone please try to set aside their knee-jerk reactions for a while to give a good reason:
WHY do humans NEED to understand the basics of something?
× You don't know how to farm — That doesn't prevent you from having food or cooking good meals.
× You don't know how to mine raw materials — That doesn't prevent you from using computers/phones made with aluminum, copper, glass etc.
× You don't know how to fell trees and shape lumber — That doesn't prevent you from sitting in that comfy chair.
× You don't know assembly language or how to write operating systems — That doesn't prevent you from using Windows or macOS or Linux.
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EVERYDAY you use hundreds of things made from THOUSANDS of technologies you don't understand, because other people already MASTERED them.
so YOU can go on to go do GREATER things.
(but you CAN still go do farming, mining, logging, writing your own OS, if you ENJOY it — nothing's stopping you — you just won't be as good as the technology that has been specialized for that over centuries, and almost certainly you won't be bringing anything new to those fields, and it'll take time away from doing other things.)
—
Maybe we shouldn't be wasting time on "oshit how do we uninvent or slow down this new technology because it makes things easier than what we grew up on"
and focus more on "what other greater things can we move on to?"
There's a whole freakin universe out there and we haven't even stepped off our home planet yet.
Firstly I'd point out that the difference here is that all of those things you mentioned are things you could learn and the distinction would be that at least currently the proofs provided by AI are inscrutable. Although this will probably change.
The second thing is to just ask what is there left to do. What are these "greater things" that people can dedicate time to, when clearly even classically cerebral activities like mathematics can be automated away. The industrial revolution already wrecked physical production of goods and made artisan workers obsolete outside of extremely niche scenarios -- that's why we call things artisanal, after all -- but there was still mental work. But now, mental work is also experiencing the same thing, and it's not clear what one should do as a human anymore.
And some people seem outright gleeful about these developments, which can be seen even in this thread. What happens when humanity becomes obsolete? And what happens when the machines that cause this obsolescence are controlled by a tiny amount of people, who suddenly don't need the rest of us? I can only hope that this turns out well for us and that with the development of these machines, humanity will get better, but the omnipresent existential dread is giving me doubts.
> What are these "greater things" that people can dedicate time to, when clearly even classically cerebral activities like mathematics can be automated away.
Their applications?
For example I'm not a mathematician but I love thinking about weird "useless" shit like how math might be like for aliens? Are numbers as fundamental as we assume? i.e. humans developed math for "arithmetic" first, then latched geometry etc on top of that. We took ages to admit zero and negative numbers.. what if an alien species develops math for "navigation" first, and starts out with complex numbers right away!?
> What happens when humanity becomes obsolete?
There's an infinity out there to explore.
> And what happens when the machines that cause this obsolescence are controlled by a tiny amount of people, who suddenly don't need the rest of us?
That's a social problem we needed to tackle more than 100 years before AI or even computers appeared.
Apparently the minutes hand was added to clock to keep time in factories, for the benefit of the factory owners, not the workers — something I learned from this 1991 show from the BBC with Terry Jones: "So This Is Progress" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Em96NVxO9Q
But I am good at one skill that I spent years studying/training for, and now that skill is not paying the bills.
At least, that's how I view most discussions on AI adoption. Technological advancements are great for humanity, but that doesn't mean it comes without costs. The luddites are a famous example that's very often mentioned in this forum.
And no, "reskilling" isn't an option for many people. If you are poor, if you have a family or have people dependent on you, you cannot put your life on pause to learn something new, especially if you have no guarantees it won't end up like last time.
People knowing things represents redundancy. It has long been a fear around technology that humans would lose the knowledge and if the technology fails or is somehow taken away, be helpless.
This is what underpins the fear, I think.
You don't know how to farm but mentally you rest easy knowing a lot of other people do know. You also know there are books you could read to learn, if you needed to. Most things are like this, you could bootstrap your way to casting metals and probably even electric lights with only books and raw materials. Computer chips don't have this property.
Personally this is why I'd like to see libraries survive, even though I actually mostly read on my e-reader. I guess I took Anathem to heart.
This is all reasonable of course, and I think you're have to be pretty cold-hearted to disagree too vociferously. What OpenAI did (opening an announcement by name-dropping the exact institution that told them not to, implying they got buy-in) is just objectively bad-faith, and more of the same from Mr. Altman.
Mathematics is an academy, and academies are human assemblages for producing truth (and the tools therein); they will stop producing if we forget to repair and refine them. It's just undeniable in the abstract.
(Sorry for the length, cut it as much as I could; mod(s) remove if you'd like. Talking to myself in the shadow of giants is how I'm coping with the ennui, I think.) That said, four philosophy nits on paradigms, scope, motivation, and pride:
1. Paradigms | The 'Math 1.0' rhetoric is undeniably powerful, but it makes it seem like he's unaware of his standpoint[1] by lumping all of "traditional mathematics" together. At the very least we've gone through four methodological revolutions in math, each one changing how the field is done on a fundamental level: ??? => Euclidean Certainty => Aristotlean Computation (~800s) => ~Newtonian Calculation (1600s) => ~Gaussian Systems (~1850s), and perhaps one in the 20th c. I lack the expertise to even gesture at. We also have clear analogues from parts of the other two acadamies in the 20th century alone: physics becoming an arcane, inelegant group effort in the ~1920s, and mainstream philosophy adopting a cloud of Kiki ideas vaguely revolving around Wittgeinstein & Chomsky in the ~1960s.
I totally understand this being distressing, especially when it's happening quickly. They, too, had people decrying the future of their fields. But we wouldn't obviously wouldn't change it, in hindsight; much of modern physics would be completely intractable without those strange, boring, unnerving methods, for example. More than intractable: unthinkable.
2. Scope | This all seems overly focused on Autumn 2026. Most egregiously, this is all built on the premise that RSI never happens, and we never acheive ASI. If we do, mathematics is almost assuredly A) the first academy to be completely outmoded, and B) the least of our problems. I cut a long thing about the caveats and effects here; at this point... if you know, you know.
3. Motivation | Ultimately this thread is focusing on human motivation throughout, a fact that would be more forgivable if acknowledged as an intentional tradeoff. Speculating that it'll be harder to have interest in math is just not worth withholding truth; for one thing, knowing that computers could solve a problem but it's banned to try would ruin motivation anyway, and worse. It's up to us to be motivated, and if I know us, we'll have no problem doing so as long as there's any utility there at all.
In more stark terms: trading progress in the fundamental academy for the sake of its current methods of recruitment and motivation seems like something posterity will almost definitely frown upon.
4. Pride | This is the common thread that weaves through all three preceeding points, I think, and is even stated in pretty blatant terms (that's Tao -- always a clear writer!):
...promising open directions are now being withheld from the public in fear that this will cause their own research to be "scooped"... "Math 1.0" placed a premium on being the first to solve an open problem, even if the solution was not initially well understood.
Sure, his thesis acknowledges that some changes are welcome, but not radical ones; his tone implies tweaks to conference schedules and authorship norms rather than fundamental restructuring of what these professions are, and what it's like to dedicate one's life to the demos through them.
Doing science (mathematic or otherwise) in this competitive, individualistic way is just clearly counterintuitive to me, even if it weren't a recent development. Imagine taking it to its conclusion and applying some kind of patent system to mathematics -- or even worse, copyright to combinations of symbols! Perhaps more riches would motivate some mathematicians, but it would so obviously eat away at the democratic principles that have brought us unimaginably far over the past 406 years.
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TL;DR: What worked well for the past ~century is not particularly relevant, and I think Tao is missing the forest here, despite one of the best sylvan trailblazers around. On his side practically-speaking for heuristic and contingent reasons, regardless.
I think we can say by now that we should not listen to the early nay-sayers and just wait a bit. With every trend, not just "AI". They still have some points (the ethics and environment etc), but the we don't hear from the Stochastic Parrot folks anymore.
Of course it's good to have the discussion... So maybe, we listen to the nay-sayers, but defer judgement on the matter... That's wisdom.
Edit, to be clear, I consider Tao to be the wisdom provider, not an early nay-sayer!
Yann LeCun's criticisms are at least balanced with an alternative approach he has teams actively working on and showing good progress in areas LLMs are weak.
If anything he is very pro-AI and far from a naysayer. Labelling anyone who doesn't isn't Linkedin style "stoked" "excited" about AI is not helpful.
This is a technology not like prior technologies. Are we okay if the technology discourages a whole generation of Mathematicians? If the technology leads to 10x fewer mathematicians -- what impact does that have on the field? These are the questions Tao is asking. And I don't think he himself claims to have all the answers, he just doesn't wanna see the math _community_ die.
The interviewee is worried about the future of math research. He is not strictly worried about being replaced, instead he is worried that he will no longer be able to launder math-as-a-hobby through math-as-something-useful as is the case today. He lays out very clearly that grant proposals claim to have useful outcomes while the proposers know those claims are nonsense.
Business as usual in math, and frankly in all the other sciences, is to do research that furthers the researchers careers or personal interests and pretend that it’s somehow useful. This would be absolutely fine if it were privately funded, but it’s not, this is public money.
In every other endeavour, lying in order to get money is considered fraud.
We have collectively wasted a huge amount of taxpayer money and human time, entire careers, on things not likely to ever matter to anyone.
I look forward to science becoming automated so that we can have real progress instead of the current broken system.
People thought, back in the 17 century, that imaginary were useless (except as a trick for some calculations). Turns out the research into these numbers back then is amazingly useful today, 300 years later, in electronics and such.
Publicly funded maths research should continue, even if some taxpayers feel it's a waste of money.
Nobody determined the usefulness of the internal combustion engine or the aeroplane after the fact. They were goals specifically worked towards. For every useful discovery that comes from this hobbyist approach there are far more that aren’t, and those would have been discovered during a goal orientated research program.
However, with AI it actually may become so cheap that the scattergun random approach becomes more viable rather than less. It’s when human time and resources are scarce that you need to optimise. The hobbyist approach may therefore ironically continue, but without the hobbyists.
> usefulness can only be determined after the fact.
Thats great! So in other words it should be perfectly fine for AI to solve all of the supposedly useless math problems so that it might possibly be useful later. No need to worry about the mathematicians hobbies here.
Actually yes, I think that AI will end up in a place where additional human effort, even at the highest level of suggesting what directions to look in, will become a rounding error compared to what the AI will achieve by itself.
So as measured by utility, I absolutely believe we don’t need humans doing science into the future. I’m sure people will continue doing it, but not for utility, for enjoyment - as a hobby. Probably we’ll all end up as dedicated hobbyists.
Haha. That’s almost verbatim what the guy said. Here, let me grab that for you:
> things that I do and that my colleagues do, this kind of like curiosity-driven, you know, applied math, computational physics type research has always been justified by, I would argue, intentionally blurring the line between what I would call, you know, science as product versus science as process
> science as product is very kind of clear-cut. It’s, you know, things like, you know, cure cancer, solve nuclear fusion, generate, you know, clean energy.
> And then there’s science as process, which is kind of the curiosity-driven stuff about, you know, like, “I want to understand protein folding,” or, “I want to understand, you know, turbulence,” or, “I want to understand quantum gravity,” or something. And broadly speaking, we have tended to justify the latter by kind of laundering it through the former
And the examples he gives are actually the more defensible ones, he talks about a friend of his working on some abstract algebra under the false guise of cryptography research later.
And it’s not just him saying it, this is simply true. He should be lauded for admitting it publicly, this is the only way any progress is made. At least, it used to be. Now it’ll be AI instead.
The whole point of public funding for science is that seemingly pointless research yields useful but hard to monetize discoveries. Otherwise VCs would be doing it.
I feel like there first will be a lot of rationalizations, hamd-wringing, and existential tummy aches, but then the eventual resigned acknowledgment (just like in Chess), that humans do math because they like to do math, not because humans will ever again be as good as computers are at math, then come to make discernments between human math proofs, and the work of an engine, maybe they'll even start start doing proofs on short time controls and stream it on Twitch.
Because the other solutions are to a) quite literally become inhuman, with cyborg integrated TPUs running local models and networked interfaces to propierary models run in data centers, or b) assert dominance of human ignorance by burning civilization down, which doesn't sound pleasant.
I suspect the whole field of mathematics will simply disappear as a career path. It seems obvious that the trajectory is for the machines to be able to provide proof on demand for any solvable problem. Whether or not the proof is understandable by humans is perhaps irrelevant in the larger sense. Doing hard math will simply become another black box tool in the larger AI toolkit for goal optimisation. Is this sad and should we try to prevent it? Is it any less sad than the venerable London cabbie who spent a life time memorising every street to gain "the knowledge" and almost overnight supplanted by machine intelligence.
I'm a lot more skeptical. I'm not a mathematician, but from my use of LLMs a very clear pattern of what they are good and bad at has emerged. They are extremely good at combining large amounts of information, and it seems this is what the current AI results in mathematics are. There are so many subfieleds of math with ties to each other, so many papers and niche results, that no human could ever read, comprehend, connect and organize that information in their brains. Pretty much all of it was created by humans. And there is real value in doing this and creating new results from what we've already discovered.
But there also is another type of discovery that requires taking a step back and looking at the problem from a different angle. If you are an engineer, how often has an LLM told you (without you explicitly prompting for it): Wait, what you are doing here doesn't really make sense, there exists a much more elegant abstraction that nobody has thought of, let's remove all that code, let's tackle the problem in a different way by thinking from first principles. Pretty much never. But in science a lot of the biggest discoveries have come from this kind of first principle thinking, questioning existing work and approaches and going against what already exists, not combining all existing data which is likely to be just a local optimum.
LLM's are very outcome oriented and i think this is where your observation comes from. You tell LLM you want something, it doesn't even question the premise and just starts calculating 100 different ways to get there. LLM's have knowledge but lack wisdom.
LLMs are inexplicably good at working within any tight feedback loop to coerce the desired solution. This is precisely why proof assistants + LLMs are non intuitively successful.
This is also why they're so good at creating three.js or Blender work when the output is so easily constrained to "Look exactly like that". I recently posted https://www.ambionix.com/blog/introducing-the-czp-1/ on here, and the audio engine in that was developed in that way.
It is true that it would be astounding to find if anyone has seen a LLM produce any useful generalization of anything resulting in a simplification. They seem to have a direct tendency to do the opposite. The brutal reality is humans have also undervalued this capability for a long time (I think the Poincare/Hilbert debate is relevant) to the point we are also taught that generalizations are, generally, bad and wrong.
I was working on a project recently where I wanted to express a relationship (that I knew existed, but didn't know how to express) between four measured scalar values. Astra insisted there was no relationship, and that any correlation wouldn't make sense.
Eventually, by walking through them, it proposed an additional fifth value and from there was able to tie everything together.
Sometimes you just gotta hit the machine until it works again.
Your experience mirrors so many managers' experience with engineering teams...
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> there exists a much more elegant abstraction that nobody has thought of, let's remove all that code, let's tackle the problem in a different way by thinking from first principles.
You literally just have to ask it. Before I left software engineering in April, I was using Claude for re-architecture all the time.
But no, it doesn't assume it should re-architect what you're handing it when you haven't asked it to.
> If you are an engineer, how often has an LLM told you (without you explicitly prompting for it): Wait, what you are doing here doesn't really make sense, there exists a much more elegant abstraction that nobody has thought of, let's remove all that code, let's tackle the problem in a different way by thinking from first principles.
I explicitly request it. It's not great at coming up with interesting ideas, but neither am I, and it can sure iterate on them faster than I can...
A very balanced perspective, and the concerns he raises are reasonable. He acknowledges that AI is going to transform mathematics, but simply dumping proofs on the math community and expecting others to do the grunt work of verifying, refining, and expanding on them is hardly a productive way to advance the field.
There seems to be more interest in hitting some arbitrary benchmark (we proved X unsolved problems) than in genuinely contributing to mathematics. But what else is to be expected? It's become a maniacal race with too much money. Too much effort is being invested in proving that the exponential curve is still holding.
I wonder if top labs will soon abandon math progress like they did go and chess.
In example of go where I'm more familiar Google deep mind poured large resources to get a super human performance first, establish superiority and abandon it. The community then built their own tools starting from reproducing their papers.
I think similar thing might happen to math. Nobody outside of math cares too much about Hamiltonian cycles in some bizarre graphs or proving lower bounds on complexity of some problem.
Once those results stop being worthy of mainstream media attention, they will abandon math and the progress will be done by mathemicians guiding the models and the community will likely establish some new rules about what makes a valuable contribution. Merely solving not yet solved problem might not be it anymore.
The amount of money they're lately ploughing into proving math theorems is inconsistent with how societies and markets have priced pure mathematics. The entire US federal budget for math research is something like $100M annually. A single college football coach can already earn 10 percent of that.
Pretty much the only enterprise that historically pays some mathematicians handsomely is quant finance, but those people are actually compensated not for proving theorems but rather for statistical modeling and programming skills. And even that industry is so technologically driven these days that pure research mathematicians no longer hold a clear edge over strong programmers with undergrad level probability and statistics at their fingertips.
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I think this is an interesting and good theory. They've probably eked out the large majority of the PR benefit at this point, so whether they continue in this vein will tell us a lot about their motivations for this work.
To take this to the next step, what happened after deep mind pretty much solved Go is that they started looking for the next set of things that hadn't been done yet. It does strike me as very likely that this will follow that same path.
I don't think it will be the case, maths have real utility. I found something interesting at the intersection of combinatorics and information geometry. To be quite frank I don't understand what I'm doing. And yet, when I ask ChatGPT to use the framework we're developing to write an algorithm, it turns out it has quasi-parity with the state of the art. I have to measure absolute perfs to decide which one is better – theirs, not mine. Ok. Time to keep improving on what I have. And this implies dropping the code and going back to the blackboard doing more super abstract math that are way out of my league.
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Interesting path forwards, and probably partly true, but there are some important distinctions:
Go was a specialized application. All the math results come as a side effect of reading the whole internet, and it will keep reading the whole internet. It will keep practicing thinking questions. Actually, math might be one of the best ways to keep them contemplating and measure their contemplation abilities, so math will always stay in the loop.
Also, math might not be useful just for humanity, but also for AI, so the system might actively benefit from new math results itself. (Not sure if any of the recent proofs qualify, but future work might.)
> I wonder if top labs will soon abandon math progress like they did go and chess.
I definitely think that this is marketing, just "with good side effects". My doubt is when they will be able to move to "marketing with better side effects", that is, research with more concrete outcomes (health, materials etc.).
Problem is, that type of research is much harder. Some doubt that progress in such areas will be quick (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/wheres-the-intelligence-explos...).
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This misses the raw advantage of a good proof. It makes conceptualization simpler. In some ways math is like a hash list of of theorems. This list makes it simpler to prove other calculations, and will always be useful, to both humans and AI models. I can see two new directions 1 - the creation of specialist theorem models; that can answer questions efficiently about one topic and 2 - we probably need to incentivize and codify ownership of theorems; charging a proportion of the compute saved by using them. Ultimately enabling mathematicians to be paid our true market value!
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I had the same idea recently. You've solved all the famous conjectures (all formulated by humans because humans found them interesting), what next? I doubt "AI formulated a math conjecture that nobody else cares about and immediately solved it" will produce that much hype. The actually interesting thing is indeed how mathematicians themselves will use these AI models going forward and how that will shape mathematics of the future.
AlphaGo and AlphaZero weren't generalized models. Math capability will presumably keep improving along with the other general capabilities, even if there wasn't a special RL focus for math itself.
Yeah chess is a good example. DeepMind came for publicity with AlphaZero. Arranged a match with Stockfish with rigged rules to make AlphaZero look better than it really was (it was amazing but the match wasn't fair) and then just published some games and went home.
I was bitter about that back in the day as I hoped for more answers, more matches, more "truth" about chess being shown. Soon after that community project Leela Chess Zero was started and not only surpassed original AlphaZero but added few hundred ELO points over it. Then the combination of NN and classical engines happened with NNUE and current Stockfish is again a few hundred ELO points stronger.
Today we pretty much know the truth in chess for all practical purposes. Human analysts/preparation experts focus on finding interesting path and opponent profiling (what is the most unpleasant for the opponent to face). They don't look for truth anymore. The game is doing great, it's more popular than it ever was.
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They already proved the point
I disagree. Firstly, people in AI likely care about math on a personal level. Secondly math is useful. Playing go or chess is basically a party trick. Being useful gives it staying power.
But, I do think you are right that there will be some level of moving on. The spotlight is currently on maths and that won't last. It will move to some other area where there is more impact to be had. So while they might shift gears and put less focus on math, it will always be there as part of the portfolio.
I think there’s a venue where they start focusing on introducing hypotheses where the model currently can’t solve it, or maybe this is already happening?
Being able to present useful novel ideas would likely generate a lot of press, for a while. I don’t know how this would look since I’m useless at math, but Im sure there are plenty of unknown problems with massive implications, that once formulated can be solved.
This argument implicitly makes a few assumptions which will probably not hold in the very near future.
One is that AI will continue hallucinating in a manner that is not easy to verify, second is that AI will not be enhanced to produced more simplified amd robust outputs, and third that a human will be required to do that. What humans in the loop are doing now is verify the process, propose shortcuts and add legitimacy, through the verification process, if that ends up being succesful its highly likely a lot less mathematicians will be required in the future.
The conclusion that this is not productive focuses on the mathematicians, but it is very productive in terms of hundreds of proofs being produced that had previously consumed uncountable hours of the brightest minds. Unless it ends up being the greatest hallucination ever ofcourse
Putting hallucination aside, LLM "theory of mind" has gotten worse over time. I feel it peaked in Opus 3 and Sonnet 3.5, GPT 4 and then GPT 4.5 for OpenAI. Since then, even with Opus 5.5, phrasing has needed careful crafting, in order that it not be taken too literally. OpenAI models suffer from this much more than Anthropic models but Claudes have backslid over time too.
This means when writing documentation, tutorials or commit messages, their output is often a garbled jumble. Assuming shared context, using invented terminology without explaining, leaking conversational states due to improper epistemic boundaries and failing to model the reader. This all usually leads to their freely generated explanations being terrible. Getting good explanations requires chaining questions that force them to line things up properly, which is not easy the less you know. These failures as something LLMs naturally struggle with make sense, given the nature of attention and RL with weak signals from human data.
Math is not merely a collection of proofs, it's a way of understanding. A proof presented in a manner that cannot be incorporated remains useless. It does not make it's way to physics like Riemannian geometry and matrix math did. This is no less true when done by humans too.
Your hallucination conclusion, checking if a proof is one, is exactly the counterproductive cost.
Most of us cannot verify that the claims in the OpenAI lore dump are in fact all correct. It will take tons of work from experts to do this. It took subject expert mathematicians to identify the discrepancy and disconnect in the Navier Stokes proofs, for example. LLMs will struggle to make use of their own proofs or turn them into knowledge that accumulates over time.
The act of proving is often more valuable than the proof itself. Human constraints and limitations force us to invent tools and abstractions that a 100,000 x 1M context swarm can bypass. The tradeoff from that AI swarm advantage is work that doesn't usually lend itself to being built upon. It's like doing all the side quests and reading all the books of an RPG versus min maxing a straight path with a guide. We might try to identify new abstractions, but the fact that we don't get access to CoT and that much of it will be illegible means mining LLM traces for what human mathematicians produce naturally will be a tedious chore.
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> One is that AI will continue hallucinating in a manner that is not easy to verify
It is an old saw at this point, but what an LLM does still cannot be divided into hallucination and non-hallucination. This is literally an anthropomorphism trap.
Layers and layers of application-specific verification can reduce the risks inherent to LLMs, to a really remarkable degree, but nothing about what these tools are suggests that this problem will go away; it will just bubble up again somewhere else.
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> assumptions which will probably not hold in the very near future [...] One is that AI will continue hallucinating in a manner that is not easy to verify
Hold up, that's an even bigger assumption in the opposite direction, and I don't see anything to support it.
At least in terms LLMs getting all the "AI" hype these days, there is no structural/mathematical reason to believe they won't continue to have the same problem they've always had of generating plausible text over rational text, and I don't think anybody even has a clear idea how it could eventually be accomplished.
I've seen "then the magic singularity occurs and somehow it solves the problem for itself", but I would classify that more as mysticism than engineering.
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> but it is very productive in terms of hundreds of proofs being produced that had previously consumed uncountable hours of the brightest minds
You’re making the following assumptions:
1. the exercise of struggling to find proofs was not productive, but this is precisely how new techniques in math were produced. Brute forcing solutions doesn’t lend itself to the creation of much new mathematics (except maybe the exercise of developing verifiable proofs)
2. the point of doing mathematics is to be “productive” in the first place. This is silly. Many people get into mathematics because of the beauty of understanding, for example.
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Even if you somehow have a 100% correct AI, it's not useful unless we can understand and internalise (and communicate) its results.
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> One is that AI will continue hallucinating in a manner that is not easy to verify, second is that AI will not be enhanced to produced more simplified amd robust outputs, and third that a human will be required to do that.
There is literally not a single shred of evidence to indicate either of your supposed eventualities. The core technology of an LLM is sampling from a distribution so there is literally no way to make it deterministically robust (only probabilistically).
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AI cannot explain chess moves it comes up with in an elegant way. What makes you think it will be able to do so for math?
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Expression of tech-faith is not intellectually honest argument.
Where does this "will probably not hold in the very near future" come from? People correctly warn about extrapolating current things onto the future, but then just throw some vague "probabilities" without providing any argument why their "probably" is somehow more grounded than others.
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Did you even RTFA? His argument absolutely doesn't make any assumptions about hallucinations, implicit or not. It's you who assumes Tao must have surely been complaining about hallucinations or some such. You've not addressed any of his arguments and moreover ask questions his post answers.
Here's a longer article which goes into a bit more of the details: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/05/the-future-of-math...
My steak is too juicy, my lobster is too buttery, my industry shaking mathematical proofs are coming too quickly
In what world is OpenAI not “genuinely contributing to mathematics”?
I’m getting whiplash from the speed at which people are suddenly accusing them, and AI in general, of not doing enough.
In TFA I read (scroll up from the link anchor) this was explained: OpenAI are not giving talks - because they can't answer any questions about the model's work. There is little follow-up activity - the actual elaboration of human understanding of the new ideas is stifled since the problem is solved.
But you are right, this is not OpenAI's "fault". The problem is - as others have said recently - that many people in mathematics want recognition for solving open questions more than they want the answers to the open questions. Everything about the economics and social environment of Mathematics will have to change.
I think that this is exactly the same split we see in software: there are those who mainly enjoy the craft aspect of building software, and are uninterested in the product or business they are supporting. Others are primarily interested in the production of useful software or building a platform or company.
I've always been in both camps myself. When it became obvious that AI was going to destroy the craft aspect - at least two years before it actually could do so - I became very discouraged, even depressed. But once it was actually good at building software, I became very excited about all the stuff I could now build. Sadly, I think a lot of people in our field have never had something they really wanted to build.
I'm in the same boat, I guess I had this naive idea that unsolved math problems would mean something if they were solved. But it seems like a lot of them at least were more thought experiments than anything else.
Perhaps mathematics was never about proving things? I know it sounds like moving the goal post, and it certainly was what motivated mathematicians on a day-to-day basis, but bear with me for a moment. I think that beyond being a creative activity that humans enjoy, math was about building new tools and systems of thought. Axiomizing things we take for granted, logic, linear algebra and calculus (on which modern LLMs rely so heavily) are such examples. People chose to participate in this field because they found it enjoyable and satisfying in some way. As a side effect, society reaped the benefits every couple of centuries. Will harvesting open problems with AI ever give us these things, or will we just be left laundry pile of Lean formalizations?
What does it mean to “genuinely” contribute to mathematics? Because the definition you use is load-bearing ;) and it might be different from that of others.
Because they published a ton of slop papers with terrible English, impossible for humans (even experts) to understand, full of non-standard terms, invented jargon etc.
So effectively, stuff got proved, but people don't really understand how, so it's mostly fucking useless and done for OpenAI's marketing team, while also pissing off the maths world at large.
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The biggest problem is LLM tends to produce over engineered, very complicated proofs that are an eyesore even for relatively simple problems. Give it a beautiful Olympiad geometry problem and LLM will tear it apart into ugly algebraic calculations, turns all lines and circles into equations and calculate their intersection points that spans multiple pages because it is a guaranteed way to solve it. Correct, but hardly any use to the user.
I’m not deep in to math but the op tweets make sense to me. In that it’s not just the final proof that mattered, but the mind and understanding of the person who arrived at the answer. An LLM dumping the answer can’t elaborate on it, can’t tell the story of how they got there, etc. But it also deprives someone else of that achievement and learning.
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You know it's valid. You're not working on incorrect assumptions. Surely there's value in that?
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The other gap in AI is it doesn't explain or lay out how it got to the final proof which is often more fruitful for new techniques etc than the final proof by itself.
> simply dumping proofs on the math community and expecting others to do the grunt work of verifying, refining, and expanding on them is hardly a productive way to advance the field.
I tend to agree with this, but what is the alternative? Should OpenAI and Anthropic employ hundreds of mathematicians to do this work? Should they just not solve math problems within their reach?
I tend to disagree with OP, for the same reason.
It's unclear what more could be expected than releasing the presumably already verified results and write-ups for each problem. Should they run a mathematics school too?
Then the comment goes on to argue AI labs were not interested in actually advancing mathematics, and that investments into AI were manically excessive.
IMO none of this follows and demand is there to justify the investments.
The comment then goes further to argue that AI labs were putting too much effort into pretending there was exponential progress rather than actually making progress.
The factual basis for this claim seems to be that OpenAI released math results and write-ups, and it's not even clear what more they could do on that topic.
That's a very negative opinion.
Look at how actual researchers are currently using the tools: they'll generally use the LLMs to create slop papers, sometimes supported by auto-formalizations, just like OpenAI does. Then they will go through the lengthy process of digesting the results, turning the often incomprehensible and poorly organised outputs into something that humans can understand and build upon, they will then give seminars on the results, further helping with dissemination. Doing so still requires expertise, and probably will for a good while.
So yes, that is exactly what they should do. Alternatively, if they are too lazy or incompetent to put in the effort themselves, do what AGMAI proposed and fund a third party to help out.
> the grunt work of verifying, refining, and expanding on them
What work do you think mathematicians do normally?
Like they sit whole day and have ideas? And where are the ideas?
The way I see it, _some_ mathematicians enjoy solving puzzles, and now AI is better at solving puzzles.
This does not affect people building new theories.
Also, it's quite prestigious to write a _book_ on some topic. And guess what writing a book entails? Refining and expanding. What you call grunt work.
My grunt work is different than doing grunt work for a company to fix their problems so that they can make more money.
Right, easy comparison to make the the open source community for software.
And it's not like this is something where we're loaned some top math genius for a limited amount of time and we have to make the most of it. Rather, this is a new high water mark. The accessibility of the results is no longer scarce. The scarcity has shifted, and that's where the focus of the math ecosystem should shift as well. And it doesn't help for a frontier community to saturate and take over messaging pipelines that were typically managed by the math ecosystem. It's not about "stay in your lane" but rather "we need coherence and be careful not to break the system."
Just two cents from someone who could screw up basic cashier math on any given day.
As with any field, convincing people to care about your ideas and your approach is half the battle
Many of the best startup ideas by the best product and engineering minds failed to gain attention and funding. Same with much of the best music - relegated to hard drives with derivative ideas only resurfaced decades later
I would expect much of the recent math dump will be leveraged by other LLM-driven research teams rather than read in depth by a human
I'm sorry I disagree entirely.
The more information the better.
The entire purpose of published work is to remove noise (and perhaps incentivize work through attributing credit).
This information is now out there. You can choose to ignore it if you wish. You may just find yourself a century behind in research.
And on that point most of this research has been looked at by their mathematics panel and comes with lean certificates, it's not exactly noise.
This to me is more the old guard not willing to let go or change their ways.
I think in a ideal world your right.
I think a problem is that math seems like a deeply toxic, ego driven domain.
I think he argued that e.g because the navier stokes millennium problem ist considered solved now, you won't get any recognition for being the first human to solve.(How would you even proof you solved it yourself and not just regurgitated the ai proof?)
And since recognition is the main objective, noone would spend time on dissecting the proof, and perhaps finding some unique approach to solving the problem, that could be transferred to other open issues.
And therefore the problem is now "poisoned". Since it's assumed to be solved noone will research it, and the potential revelations won't be found
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I think it's quite clear the mathematics panel didn't read most of the papers with the scrutiny it would take to publish it, if only because the lean certificates and the informal proofs are not 100% the same.
And if it's hard to understand (which seems to be the most common reaction) it's not exactly devoid of noise either
There was an opportunity for people to work with the AI to produce a proof, now it almost feels they're working against it.
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> Too much effort is being invested in proving that the exponential curve is still holding.
Given sustained exponential growth is mathematically impossible to maintain with finite resources, it's funny to me they're using advanced mathematics to try and achieve this.
Once LLMs pass the threshold to being to invent new general-purpose methods and frameworks, the frontier is irreversibly lost to AI and it becomes simply a hobby that mathematicians pursue. They work through, digest, and maybe write up the proofs for understanding. But the real meat will be growing the LLMs. Who knew software eats the world was so true?
> simply dumping proofs on the math community and expecting others to > do the grunt work of verifying, refining, and expanding
Hm, kinda reminds me of my college days. "Proof trivial, left as home work." was a sentence my Profs loved to say.
> but simply dumping proofs on the math community and expecting others to do the grunt work of verifying, refining, and expanding on them is hardly a productive way to advance the field
This is a transitive period. In a few years, verification and exchange between model instances will happen faster than humans can follow. Human input will be an ethical question, and not a productivity one, because it will be the bottleneck in any science.
How to make sure it doesn't evolve into some sort of Library of Babel of science?
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And what use of that?
Etic is a factor of productivity, and the larger the contextual window is the weightier it becomes. That’s even integrated within the paperclip parabola.
If the focus in placed on maximizing some easily measurable output on a narrow perspective, situation is unlikely going to match a sweet spot of holistic equilibrium which is maximizing harmony and happiness through humanity as a whole.
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Less Liszt/Paganini, more chamber music and teaching. I like it!
"community building"
For what?
If math is just about having a community of other mathematicians to hang out with, it still isn't a career. Nobody is paying money you need in order to to eat, just to hang out in a community.
Just like a software engineer, "Well AI can write all my projects now, but I have my local Rust Users Group to hang out with". Nobody is paying me to hang out and hand code Rust.
Generate and dump on others to verify is how the generative-AI people operate. Be it in maths or just your regular job.
The amount of Confluence pages of "research" that is just a dump of LLM output someone passed to me to review is staggering
I hate this approach, it's unbelievably selfish
Its kinda like the arms race in the cold war. There came out some truly marvelous technologies but the actualy goals were frankly terrifying.
That seems short sighted though. A few years ago models couldn't do this at all, I'm not sure there's any evidence to suggest exploring and refining results is outside their capabilities or will remain so.
OAI obviously have a fiscal incentive here, but to presume a year from now we won't see improvements and more succinct work on the results coming from models?
The problem is that one a person writes a 60 page proof in theory that person has spent an inordinate amount of time on the proof and can answer questions, describe some insight, etc etc.
If a random person is given a 60 page proof to digest and not the author, those hidden insights that _aren't_ in the paper might be completely inaccessible. Maybe the AI will "just" be able to provide the insights. Maybe. But pedagogy is tricky work, and despite these AIs being able to do all this fancy math we can't get them to write good cover letters yet, so....
Ultimately we might be left with just a bunch of intellectually unsatisfying proofs. This means way less drive to simplify the proofs or rework them.
End result: we generate a layer of "less efficient" mathematics, that won't get built upon. We will not actually have any shoulders upon which to stand.
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> I'm not sure there's any evidence to suggest exploring and refining results is outside their capabilities
OP didn’t suggest that.
The bar has been raised. Everyone has to meet it now. An inelegant solution squatted onto the internet doesn’t count as discovery per se, even if it’s impressive.
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But what should they do? They got all these proofs, should they just have sat on them?
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> There seems to be more interest in hitting some arbitrary benchmark (we proved X unsolved problems) than in genuinely contributing to mathematics
I feel the same way about academia, the papers, the citations, the ego, the narcissism and the taxpayer codependency that got cut off and turns out wasn’t necessary at all thanks to a private sector entity running laps around them
I don’t feel that academics need to pursue the discipline and distributed brain-wracking that has sometimes resulted in the solved math problems, just because more times they find other nooks and crannies to explore along the way. I think the blueprint is enough. Standing on the shoulders of giants is good enough.
and if the concern is that they can’t figure out what to do with a proof, next year’s AI will
Why not asking another chatbot to verify, like what we are doing with coding ?
That's not the hard part. The hard part still requires humans (and/or _maybe_ a bunch of tokens) and a lot of work.
And then what?
> There seems to be more interest in hitting some arbitrary benchmark (we proved X unsolved problems)
> genuinely contributing to mathematics
What's the difference between the two? Proofs are no longer the goalpost?
Proofs are valuable but I believe the mathematical community values understanding more. Proofs were previously a great way to develop understanding. Now, less so.
Not an expert, but explaining the proof and it being independently verifiable as important as just putting a paper of it. Reminds me of 1000 page proof of Goldbach’s conjecture that a Mathematician reached sometime back. He was told plainly that no one is going to invest time in verifying the proof because there’s a good chance there’s an error somewhere in between.
Proofs of open problems are valuable because we are assuming that proving the problem requires some new method or infrastructure in math to prove it. Basically proving open problems isn't actually useful if it doesn't develop new tooling for mathematics, which can help us create new open problems, solve other ones etc.
I recommend RTFA, it explains exactly that: why proofs should not be considered the goalpost, and why dumping all these AI-generated proofs might be an overall negative for mathematics as a whole.
Yes, it is indeed a balanced view.
Those few thousand mathematicians are now getting a taste of their own medicine. After all, it was people with extraordinary mathematical talent who developed machine learning and large language models, leaving hundreds of millions of people who earn their living through speaking, writing, or teaching worried about their future job prospects.
Still, I believe almost everyone will be fine. Perhaps AI will also prove good at coming up with new conjectures, and some mathematicians may shift towards applied mathematics or other sciences.
Pretty tenuous connection to blame mathematicians for everything bad created in the world, that happened to use math.
This Math 1.0 followed by Math 2.0 framing is wrong. Mathematics did not start a few decades ago when problem solving became the norm. And it will not end now when problem solving turns out to be "easy".
Mathematics will revert to it's main practice, which is to study.
There are lots of weird panic reactions by some prominent problem solvers. See for example the ridiculous cease and desist like statement of AHM shared at Tao blog.
Put this Math 1-2.0 with that AHM statement together and you'll realize that this is a power struggle and that you see only one side of it.
Mathematicians have very diverse opinions about this. I, for example, am for as much as possible automatic harvesting of all these "low hanging" fruits. Should be disclosed as soon as possible, free of any bottleneck, and citable. The mathematics community may do whatever its various members desire to do with these results. Let them decide individually what to do with them. This AI tool is here to stay.
This looks indeed like a public relations campaign, it would be helpful to the conversation to contribute your opinion, in a polite way.
The future of "math" is not just solving, but communicating what was solved, and why that solving is important. "Math" as a discipline is only ever been half created, they abandoned explaining themselves like it was beneath them. Well, now in "Math 1.0 finally whole" they will be explaining what they did to the rest of us. If you can't explain you are not really there.
That's what math has always been about, even if not everyone is necessarily as talented a communicator as someone like Thurston -- who was himself an exponent of computational tools in math research:
>I think of mathematics as having a large component of psychology, because of its strong dependence on human minds. Dehumanized mathematics would be more like computer code, which is very different. Mathematical ideas, even simple ideas, are often hard to transplant from mind to mind....Translation in the direction conceptual -> concrete and symbolic is much easier than translation in the reverse direction, and symbolic forms often replaces the conceptual forms of understanding....
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici...
This is an entitled take. The usefulness of a thing has nothing to do with how easily communicable it is. That is the whole premise of specialization and becoming an expert. People go in-depth on things so they can say “trust me on this” and so you don’t have to. You are advocating for a tyranny of the illiterate.
Also, this reads like you didn’t like math classes. That sucks, but it’s no basis for societal organization
I am advocating for effective communications, it is not as if knowledge once understood remains difficult. To communicate and convey understanding is good, and to withhold understanding is tyranny.
The value here seems to be the insights that the author of the proof gained, and the paths they took and maybe more importantly didn't take. Inviting only the human prompter to a talk on the paper is like inviting only the department chair, manager of the actual author.
The valuable part that Tao is feeling the absence of is the insight, and you can only get that from talking to the swarm of agents that developed the original proof with all of their context.
So to me it feels like we don't need Math 2.0, but Authorship 2.0. I want to "meet" the context that generated these proofs. I mean luckily these were not generated by faceless systems like a SAT solver, you can actually talk to it, but I'm not sure if we can step beyond our pride and grant the true authors of these proofs that recognition.
These systems don't have a genuine capacity of introspection, beyond just mining the conversation trace. When you're asking them why they did this or that, they are basically guessing anew from the outside, and are just as likely to hallucinate as they are to hit the right answer. These are mechanical systems which brute-force chains of various (re)combinations of techniques acquired from the training data. The true authors are all those who have contributed those techniques in the past.
I think that's debatable. Anthropic's interpretability research suggest models do have self-introspection ability, at least in the "J-Space": https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/ ; and this private working/'introspection' space is distinct and distinguishable from the tokens they output (CoT tokens are output too).
This was how it was done in chemistry back in the day: release a cooking instruction. If it fails, visit the colleagues and give hints on what you meant.
The idea would be that you should not fiddle with the minds who try to independently evaluate your works, so that is not a feasible approach to truth seeking.
While in organic chemistry, this way, valid progress was made, you can always avoid a perpetuum mobile inventor and get conned.
The problem is that the reasoning traces are kept secret. OpenAI doesn't publish them because it would lead to distillation attacks from other AI companies.
The reasoning traces were traditionally keept secret by legacy mathematicians as well.
"When the architect completes a fine building, he removes the scaffolding." - Carl Friedrich Gauss
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> problems are being solved autonomously by AI prompters who have no interest in the broader field itself once their initial target is "solved"
This is pretty much what a person that proivded patronage to a matematician used to be. API prompters are people who provide patronage for AI mathematicians.
You don't talk with them about the discoveries. About discoveries you should talk with who actually made them. Namely the LLMs.
Another analogy might by that you shouldn't expect to have interesting discussion about the essence of art with art producer.
Just thank them for the inference they covered and interact with the results instead.
Pure mathematics, in my view, is not science, not craft - it is art.
AI, however powerful, is a tool, only as important as the amount it helps mathematicians. Creating mathematics without human understanding is as sound as mass producing copies of Michelangelo David.
“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture [...] yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.” - Bertrand Russell, "From The Study of Mathematics" (1902)
“A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. [...] The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.” - G. H. Hardy, "A Mathematician's Apology" (1940)
Oh look, more people finding out they're not that special after all.
The same could be said of Software. Instead of giving up on creating novel projects and instead just taking other peoples ideas and porting them to Rust, we could be embracing AI to push software and computers farther.
Im not sure how that will work, but im convinced the current paradigm of just pushing agents into codebases for not much reason other than you can is going to make building software incredibly boring and push creative people away from the field and stagnate progress.
My prediction is software gets boring and building hardware projects will be the new frontier for creative engineers looking to push computing further. Which is probably a good thing.
Originally the word computer described a person doing the act of computation.
I believe in the future, we're going to see a similar shift in "programmer" - instead of a human programming the computer, you'll give the ai an idea and it will spit out a program.
And just like how automating the act of computation revolutionized what we could compute, automating the act of writing code will change the act of programming - hopefully, as you described, allowing us to do things that simply were not practical in the past.
I was about to comment the same.
People wrote many books about software engineering, all from valuable experience from buildng expensive software systems. But in the age of AI, is there still anything learnable from generated code?
Personally I always ask AI to summarize its findings and lessons in a .md file. And I always learn something from it.
But could AI utilize some new patterns and paradigms I wasn't aware of? Very likely. Because we only learn from our personal grave mistakes, a summary from others gets neglected and forgotten
But these days hardware is software. One microcontroller replaces so much electronics. Software is eating the world, as the man said.
> same could be said of Software
Sort of. An elegant proof is useful beyond what it shows. It hints at new mathematics, and can prompt discovery in applied fields. I don’t think I’ve heard of elegant code leading to discovery on its own.
I think this happens all the time actually, but it's often smaller scale. Like someone writes a neat architecture to do X at their company, and later someone else walks in, looks at this code and sees it's now super easy to do Y, which then turns out to have immense user/business value.
> I don’t think I’ve heard of elegant code leading to discovery on its own.
Every software design pattern came from elegant code. People wrote code, summarize code, learnt from code, and taught code. That's discovery
> elegant code
Usually it's the opposite. "That's in prod? And it works? It shouldn't work and I thought it was doing something else. Why does it work?"
But it has. Think of design patterns and other programming paradigms (logic programming, functional programming, etc).
you must not be familiar with haskell
> I don’t think I’ve heard of elegant code leading to discovery on its own.
I’ve not heard of it either, but code is an abstraction of math, so I don’t see why this couldn’t theoretically happen.
Anecdotally, I’ve started spending time advancing my math skills beyond the early college level I stopped at and I’ve frequently found I already know concepts of more advanced math - I just didn’t know what they were called or how to apply them to an equation on paper, but I’ve been using them for years and intrinsically grasped the underlying academics.
I do agree with you, although I think that there may be still some advancement available in software in terms of programming languages or novel architecture design. But frontier is much more around hardware, just thinking about computing power, electrical transmission, material constraints on power, connectivity, insulation. I would definitely advise kids to study physics and materials engineering than CS.
I mean if we're being honest, most of CS studying (as practiced) was a waste of time anyway.
The S fell short in actual reality for the most part, as it was merely a hiring requirement. A hiring requirement that didn't even make sense, because the skillset of academic CS only marginally overlaps with the skillset one wants to hire for.
Material engineering at least for the most part has actual real-world applications where one can push humanity further. CS (as practiced, not necessarily the idea of real CS but the CS we got due to it being used as a hiring filter) for the most part is just self-referential spinning with mostly unclear results.
There is real impressive work being done in that field, of course, but I'd argue that the majority of it over the last decade or so at least was just performative nonsense.
Maybe by again allocating new resources to other fields, what hides under the label CS can become more pure actual CS again. I think that would also be a much less miserable experience for everyone involved.
Models have limits too, I don't think software will become boring. I think it'll become more interesting, in the not so distant future one software engineer will be able to do so much more than today.
What new things are even left to discover in software? You can still use C for all the backend stuff and I don’t think all the endless stream of front end frameworks and libraries are all that innovative. I think the only tangible innovations we’ve made over the last few decades have been in infrastructure management. All heavy lifting is done by mathematics anyways.
Well i mean, the whole idea of discovery is that you're not sure what you will discover until you do
> What new things are even left to discover in software?
The will to implement the stuff we learned, instead of letting dark patterns and churn for the sake of churn get the better of that :P
>the mere knowledge that a solution exists "contaminates" efforts by both humans and AI to find alternate routes to the problem that reveal additional insights
This really expresses the heartburn you see across all fields, not exclusive to careerism. I certainly have friends in decomp and fan translation spaces that have been demotivated by the current rash of efforts happening there.
The rush to be "first" has always been over-celebrated, but it would be nice to believe there's a way to get beyond that thinking.
This has already been the case in AI/ML and computer vision papers via flag planting papers. Have an idea, super quickly publish a hasty work based on it that doest actually work, methodological and eval issues, engineering terrible, slow, bad results etc. But it was the first so now your concurrent work that was much better evaluated, better implemented, etc is suddenly worthless and unpublishable.
> decomp
This I don't understand, seems like an obvious thing to automate, especially for byte-matching?
Byte-matching has been a side-effect of gaining an understanding of how the software works. With this you are skipping the understanding and you will not get people like Kaze Emanuar on YouTube who have dedicated a lot of time to building upon this understanding to create something better.
I don't think it's motivating to solve a black box by having AI generate another black box if what you want is to understand how the thing worked.
If your goal was to do something for the games you love and understand them on a deeper level, then just handing that off to an LLM doesn't really give you the same sense of accomplishment.
Why were we doing math in the first place? We should be happy that math problems were being solved, since presumably they were blockers for other problems in science and the like. But it feels like math was really more about seeking enlightenment, like a form of mental yoga or something. If so, we can just ignore AI proofs and continue on maybe?
There’s a somewhat famous lecture [0] by Wigner (one of the greats of 20th century physics if you’re not familiar) on exactly this topic. One of his points is that new tools and ways of thinking developed on the way to solving mathematical problems with no apparent application often find downstream applications in science and engineering. If we’re skipping the part where we identify and understand the new math, will we still reap the unreasonable effectiveness? Tao’s position in this post suggests that the current wave of LLM successes is not conducive to this dynamic
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...
I'm a retired AI researcher and I still enjoy programming. However, I don't use any however assistance as I still want the thrill of learning new things. Unfortunately, it appears that the only way for most developers to enjoy similar activities is to be retired with enough money
This is exactly why half the conversation conversations about AI eventually become a critique of capitalism. AI isn’t for fun or joy, it’s explicitly for business use. For replacing people. For extracting more out of each worker. That’s all the major companies (OAI, Anthropic, etc) are offering. None of this is designed to give us any more freedom or time to pursue the things we are passionate about.
I feel like we’re circling back to that 2010s energy of “everyone can be an entrepreneur.” Now it’s “everyone can build software”
You could replace "math" with "programming" in your comment for a different perspective.
If you're considering an individual, maybe this makes sense.
But if you're consdiering a community, this falls apart. The maths community has universities, has professors who are paid, has students which are getting their degrees for varying reasons, it has conferences, has publications, papers, projects etc etc, all of which will get some negative impact some AI.
You know that line "when a measurement becomes a target it ceases to be a useful measurement". This line holds up to different degrees for various measurements and targets. For maths it holds up very well. The goal is "contribute to make the world better by increasing humanity's understanding of maths" and the measurement, which by evaluating an individual on it we're turning into a target, is "how much does the individual publish new findings". Measurement turned target holds up great. It's almost impossible to publish new findings and not contribute to humanity's understanding of maths. But with AI these two are being decoupled. You can produce lots of new findings, but the community is saturated and they don't get assimilated into humanity's understanding. Why do individuals use AI then? Because you've made the target "how much does the individual publish new findings" and they have to compete or lose.
If a coal miner or car mechanic would say something like this, they would be called a luddite by the same science people.
Its different when your own job is on the line.
When human manual arts were being automated away it was supposed to be not only acceptable but any complain and you were told you were a progress blocking luddite.
Now that mental labor is getting automated, the response to automation is very different.
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To many professional mathematicians it's a form of art. But at the end of the day, it's a profession done for money, and even if they like doing it as a day to day job, they'd probably be doing something else if they had absolute freedom over their time. This is how I personally classify things as art or chore. If people continue doing something the same way when there is no financial motive, it's art in its pure form.
> even if they like doing it as a day to day job, they'd probably be doing something else if they had absolute freedom over their time.
Not the mathematicians I know. They’d happily drop the academic admin stuff, but they’d absolutely keep doing mathematics in much the same way.
Based on the research mathematicians I have known, I'd disagree with 'they'd probably be doing something else if they had absolute freedom over their time' for at least a large number of them, although it probably varies from individual to individual.
Some call that "entertainment", or "a hobby".
If we're going to be frank about it, higher level math is:
1) Intellectually challenging, to such a degree that those wishing to enter the field need to have a certain level of intellectual prowess to do so. This creates some levels of mystique, with a sprinkle of elitism and gatekeeping.
2) Driven (among other things) by prestige. And the more pure the math is, the more prestigious it is.
3) So complex that people can spend their entire working careers chasing a handful of problems. The amount of time researchers spend on very specific problems is mind-boggling, if we think about the results.
4) Intensely captivating for the people deep in the weeds.
And the deeper you get, the longer you study, the more you start to value things like "mathematical beauty", and may start to view math as a form of art.
Like many similar fields, you end up with this ivory tower where people can dedicate their whole lives to thinking deeply about extremely niche and theoretical problems.
Similar things are happening in the competitive programming world.
Quite a lot of people are not happy they aren't elite anymore, and many have spent years to decades to arrive here.
Simply put you invest years of your life to establish a kind of distinction over others, and that goes away. That hurts.
But its not something surprising. Most of these competitive programming problems were actually English languages puzzles, because you couldn't dial up the mathematical difficulty anymore making it a fields medal problem. And in most cases in simple language weren't even that hard to begin with, and you could look up solutions to these problems in an hour of Google searching.
Where was Terence Tao where other workers were being replaced by immigrants, robots and other automation?
Academics and white collars now get to experience what blue collar workers experienced in the past.
Same as what developers in USA experienced who were and are getting replaced by Indians.
He grew up in Australia, didn't he? He was the one doing the replacing I suppose.
He is a imigrant.
I think this focus on a "holistic" approach applies to everything AI is touching now, not just math. On Twitter I see people one-shotting games, or reproducing games. If the goal is to just one-shot a game using AI, it's done. But if the goal is to produce immersive medium that people can truly enjoy, admire the story and the craftsmanship, and can find entire new ways of bringing a story to life, that's something else entirely.
Sadly the experience with physical products tells us that the vast majority of people prefer cheap disposable crap over expensive craftsmanship.
The dynamics of software are vastly different from manufactured goods though. Software can be distributed at essentially zero cost so the disposable crap analogy breaks down.
Like given the choice, the vast majority of people would prefer one quality game like Minecraft, LoL, or Fortnite, vs. thousands of one-shot generated games, and looking at user playtime this is exactly what we see. If anything AI is just going to entrench these pre-AI franchises even more.
I don't think they prefer it, but the price is a deciding factor.
Most people would be happier with La Marzocco coffe machines which costs thousands of dollars, but if you get an OK shot with a 100 USD DeLongi, then the choice is clear for majority of the population.
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I don't think this is really true for games, a lot of games have enormous resources thrown at their development and marketing and they fall flat because they simply aren't very fun. Then we have a million slop games that sell 3 copies on steam, and in practice only the most unique/fun/addictive games can break through.
I, for one, am profoundly thankful that the ~300 year mania around innovation and newness is beginning to wane. You don't need to read that many history books to appreciate that the values that we have today are profoundly different than what they were previously. It takes a few more books, and a pinch of humility, to appreciate that today's values are neither universal nor the necessary outcome of a teleological evolutionary process. The reworking that Tao suggests here reaches far beyond math. The fact that mathematicians are starting to wrestle with these questions is cause for great optimism. Once VCs do the same thing, we'll be on the other side of the storm.
I hope Terry has somewhere private where he can safely express his anger at how poorly math has been treated by these AI corps. I understand that as a recently pro-AI public figure he is limited to ambivalence, so I understand him adding caveats like “maybe math 2.0 has a place for AI”, but it can’t feel good to say stuff like that just days after OpenAI so drastically salted the earth.
> how poorly math has been treated by these AI corps
Yes, what a terrible thing to advance the field significantly and release the results publicly for everyone. Truly despicable.
Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? They somehow invented a way of solving an open problem without advancing the field. That’s something that mathematicians had never even thought was possible. And while the mathematicians were beginning the great conversation to re-examine their fundamental understanding of the pursuit of math in light of this new phenomenon, OpenAI decided they would do it again 372 more times.
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What a disingenuous, willfully ignorant take. None of these AI companies have been acting in good faith or in any way other than grotesque self-aggrandizement to the expense of everyone else.
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"Oh no — A smart person doesn't hold my view — He must be faking it!"
The real question is how do you come up with a credible 3-5 year research program that is unlikely to be scooped or become pointless overnight.
3-5 years is the period of a grant, and grants have to make research progress, or you don’t get the next grant.
Well, in this case, I think the problem and what should be updated is how grants work. They were stupid before, but now they are even more.
Stupid, but could be fun: grants are given for how amusing your proposed prompts are.
Everyone should have a portfolio of prompts that are indecipherable by other humans but when fed to a frontier model, produces shocking one paragraph english version of a 10000 line lean proof
Obfuscated prompt grant contest
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He is right, I think this would be a good direction for sectors and careers that are at risk of becoming redundant.
I love smart people like this; even when there's a threat, instead of just being in denial or boycotting out of anger, they figure out a new path for their community
I said this when OpenAI announced they had solved a Millennium prize problem: solving open problems for the sake of it will lose its cachet. AI companies will no longer benefit by making these announcements. They've proven the effectiveness of their tool. If people want to use them to advance human knowledge then let them do that. There's no benefit to humanity to turn electricity into proofs just for the sake of it.
It's not just about proving the benefit of the tool, it's about proving that the latest version of the tool is better than the previous version and of the competitors' latest versions
In this case though the compute per problem was pretty reasonable so if this model was available this rate of progress would mostly continue whether OpenAI funds it or not.
Even when a problem got solved, there has always been value in publishing simpler proofs and corollaries that give better intuition into the broader field.
If I understand Tao correctly, he's saying that's going to have to be the focus going forward. I just default to thinking the models are going to be much better than us at that, too.
> the models are going to be much better than us at that, too.
I wonder if this is true. The code produced by these models are not really getting any more elegant over time. On contrary, the models seem to be getting worse, often proposing really baroque architectures. You can use RL to optimize for correctness, optimizing the vibe seems much more difficult.
For deeper complexity, elegance may turn out to be a hindrance. Better or worse may turn out to be descriptive of taste and nothing else. On the other hand, elegant alternatives might be brought into reach by this first messy contact with new ideas. Who can say at this stage?
There’s value but it is not rewarded commensurately with the contribution. Same for doing peer review.
Studies have figured out how many 'concepts' or 'chunks' of information a typical human brain can hold in working memory. The famous 7±2 is a common way this is expressed. This research has been disputed and further nuanced (I know, I know, replication crisis...), but for the sake of argument, assume that there is some cognitive limit to how much information we can hold in our heads at once.
In the beginning, calculus as invented by Newton used complex ruler and compass constructions. Newton had a high cognitive capacity, so it was understandable to Newton. It took mathematicians coming later, including Leibniz, to turn this technique into a body of work that fits more easily into the average human mind. Newton and Leibniz independently developed calculus, but Leibniz's notation and formalism in particular provided a much more compact way of expressing and manipulating the ideas of calculus.
Open up Spivak at any page and find a formula; you should probably find that it contains 7±2 'things'. Like an integral, say: the integral sign, lower and upper limits, the function inside, the variable of integration. Then the theory and the rules for transforming these expressions was created so that working with calculus becomes mostly a set of rote operations.
Now a 1st-year student can do more calculus in a week than Newton even could have done in a year.
Now imagine aliens land on the Earth which have 10x our cognitive capacity, and we ask them about their mathematics. It would probably be incomprehensible to us because it would not have gone through a cognitive bottleneck sufficiently small to force it to fit into our minds. They might be totally happy with a mathematical expression containing 700 'things.'
We now find ourselves in this situation, except the alien is an AI we created.
I believe a cognitive bottleneck needs to be maintained so that maths can still remain human maths.
EDIT: Basically, mathematical elegance is finding a representation which allows irrelevant detail to dissapear.
Something interesting for folks to keep in mind.
Einstein did not typically use the formal peer review system to "settle on published work." Almost all of his major papers (including his landmark 1905 Annus Mirabilis papers) were published directly by journal editors without formal peer review.
When Physical Review sent his 1936 draft to a referee, Einstein was so outraged that he withdrew the paper and vowed never to publish with the journal again. He corrected his math only after an informal, friendly discussion with colleague Howard Percy Robertson—who, unbeknownst to Einstein, was the anonymous reviewer.
It is surprisingly similar to "Catching crumbs from the table" by Ted Chiang, a sci-fi perspective published in Nature in 2000, https://www.nature.com/articles/35014679
What should OpenAI have done instead of what they did? I think it’s far better that we get the messy dump of proofs ASAP so everyone can grapple with the reality of what these models can and can’t do, and participate in figuring out where things go from here.
What would a more “responsible” approach have been?
For each paper they think they have, reach out to mathematicians working in the relevant area to find ones willing to take on the role of advisor, co-author, reviewers, etc. Basically just follow the same process that a postdoc would to publish a paper.
You're just moving the problem around. Instead of OpenAI and Anthropic dumping proofs, you'd instead have someone (maybe an aspiring graduate student, maybe a hobbyist, maybe an established mathematician who has disdain for existing process) dump these proofs en masse personally.
Then Math2.0 will be "AI please explain this solution"
Let us know when it is clear that UCLA does not hire the candidate with the most top-tier journal papers.
It’s more likely that instead of spending a 100K/year direct grant on two PhD students, PIs will hire 1 and have the student spend 50K on AI.
More likely is that frontier labs give huge discounts of EDUs if they consent to allowing training.
Plus requiring attribution in papers.
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My understanding is that top tier math programs don't hire based on journal pubs and haven't for a bit. Math journals are pretty slow and hiring is really via reputation building based on one or two big wow ideas / proofs propogated via arxiv and talks.
It’s just as unlikely that this will cease. hiring a professor at a top school because they were an excellent math teacher… It won’t happen.
This is basically On proof and progress in mathematics by Thurston restated. When Thurston wrote it in 1994, many people didn't understand what he is talking about.
https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236
And already on page 2 Thurston cuts the the root of the issue, 30 years ago:
>On a more everyday level, it is common for people first starting to grapple with computers to make large-scale computations of things they might have done on a smaller scale by hand. They might print out a table of the first 10,000 primes, only to find that their printout isn’t something they really wanted after all. They discover by this kind of experience that what they really want is usually not some collection of “answers”—what they want is understanding.
The difference in reactions by the maths community should probably be spit up into those who have read and understood On Proof and Progress and actually thought deeply about why they do mathematics, and those who haven't.
Are you suggesting that Tao, whose banner image on his blog is a quote from On Proof and Progress, has not read Thurston's essay?
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this is what came to mind for me as well.
> But at the current time, the opposite is often occurring: problems are being solved autonomously by AI prompters who have no interest in the broader field itself once their initial target is "solved", and do not understand the AI output well enough to answer questions on the result, give talks, or otherwise interact with the rest of the field.
Sounds like Terence Tao would have said the same about Ramanujan who basically just "solved" problems without much explanation / reasoning / communication other than it just arrived from god.
In the case of Ramanujan, others took on the responsibility of socializing and community building knowing that he wouldn't do it himself. Why can't the same approach happen here?
There will be people who want to just "solve" math problems now that they have a new tool that lets them express themselves this way. Maybe the don't want to participate in the broader math community, etc. Why discourage them, or add friction / a barrier to them participating in their own way? Why not take on the burden of socializing, making sense of, and community building yourself?
There may be valid reasons here I'm missing, but to me this seems a bit like wanting others to approach a field in a particular way even though the field can support many ways.
I think many saw working with Ramanujan as helping or being involved with a one in a generation (or even higher) talent.
Translating LLM proofs to human-ese is instead grunt-work. One that is bound to dissapear in a few years anyways.
He would never say that because Ramanujan was the one who had the insight that he couldn't explain, not a machine. If a machine solves the problem, then the machine deserves the credit, not the person who prompted it.
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My university math teacher considered his job done when he showed me the proof. He literally said "I gave you the proof, what more do you want?". That was the end of my math education.
So, now he can join the club. The AI gave him the proof, what more does he want?
Heh.
Math? Everyone is talking about math, with math-centric discussions and solutions. I think the obsession with math is simply to distract ourselves from the fact that it's coming for all of us.
None of these essays even remotely consider it. Denial is a helluva drug.
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Does this response properly anticipate how math will change further with the next N model generations? Exposition and exploration may fall well within the capabilities of future models.
These posts came shortly before the math release by OpenAI. I hope the continued discussion of the goldmines in their release helps clarify a vision for how to proceed.
This is a distilled version of what people say about the tech industry in the past year or so. Replace math with any field, and the statement is still relevant.
I don't think it's that simple. I divide AI-impacted fields into three buckets:
1. Some present a unified line that the whole point of their craft is the human experience, and that automation is the antithesis of that. Marathon runners don't care that a car can get there faster, poets don't care that Poem Bot 2000 can write poems too. I think this is smart if you can credibly take this position. The difficulty is mostly convincing the buy side, which requires being very outspoken about your views.
2. Some appear to be undecided, with one faction taking the pro-human stance and another rushing to accelerate things with AI. A good example of this is mathematics, and I really wonder where they end up in the long haul. They have a very good claim on #1, because mathematics is pretty close to an art form and is robustly insulated from the pressures of the marketplace. But they can also choose option #3, below.
3. Some crafts prioritize results above all else, practitioners either rushing to extract as much money as possible before it all collapses, or believing that they can out-prompt everyone else forever and that their prompting skills are indispensable to their employers in the long haul. That's software engineering. I think this is going to be interesting to watch.
I don't think it's smart at all to position yourself in bucket 1.
There's a reason there are maybe a few hundred professional marathon runners in the world vs tens of thousands of professional mathematicians. Bucket 1 is basically an "amusement for the upper classes" type of deal. Any field that goes in that direction would have to shrink down massively.
It also devalues the field in my opinion from something really profound with actual impact in the world to a somewhat vain leisure activity. (basically going back to gentleman scientists) But I know other people would see it exactly the opposite way.
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Ah but your buckets are based on your assumptions about the topic.
You say marathons are just for fun, but prior to the wheel it was the only way to get around. (Other than horses in some places)
So it’s not that running is immune to automation, it’s that we’re already post-automation and that only people doing it for fun are left.
I think your second bucket would need to be changed, as it's not really undecided for some and Tao in fact argues (in a way) that there is no need for the field to decide. There is a need for results, but there is also a need for humans to fully understand why the results are the way they are and how they were obtained. This doesn't replace the human in the loop it's more of a cooperative effort.
I'd end up with the buckets
a) Fully human
b) Hybrid human-AI
c) Fully AI
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Seems like neat buckets but you may want to find one example for the first which can actually be done by an llm as running is not its strong suit afaik
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OpenAI counterexample solves the millennium problem in a Yes/No manner - we do know in general that singularity could arise, but it still isn't solved in terms of "Why", ideally we could take an arbitrary physical problem and decide if Navier-Stokes equation can be applied to it.
This is similar to general solvability of the quintic equations - Abel provided a proof first but only with the advent of Gallois theory we could basically understand it in full and decide for any quinitic if it's solvable by radicals or no.
I think the real question is "can we apply these solutions?"
It is important that we stay focused - this is theatre. Incredibly impressive, but this doesn't yet show evidence of helping society, which is the whole reason we were doing this in the first place.
Stephenson’s Anathem solves some of these problems with cloistered groups (“maths”) that only interact on an epicyclic basis so that old wisdom becomes stabilized with new knowledge has supports for metabolization. I would enter a math.
I also love the concept of Maths in Anathem. One of my all time favorite books!
Off topic, but the font is barely legible on my screen? Firefox, Win11 https://imgur.com/a/8LrOojX
Same here. Firefox on Windows 11 looks awful. Edge looks better (I don't use Edge)
Feels very similar to the emotional rollercoaster programmers are going through. And presumably soon everyone else
What an incredible distraction all of this is
When you mechanise, you take the "meaning" out of the effort and that, in of itself, is death of human pursuit of the venture.
The industrial revolution did that to battles and wars and it inspired Tolkein's lores to a considerable degree. He loathed what mechanisation had done.
I feel something similar is happening to Mathematics. I shudder to think what would come of other human pursuit this mechanisation targets next.
For many on HN, mechanising things is the reason of their existence ...
(and I don't even think that is exaggerated very much)
No, you're right. I clearly missed reading the room :D But I'm glad how Terence Tao sees it. I was relying him to do that for the NS results as well.
I didn't follow through to the PhD, but I spent few years building up to understanding of Fluid Dynamics and Functional Analysis to come close to NS. It's intriguing that it's "solved", but what interests me is then "what do we learn from it" and what lies beyond in non-linearity.
In the 10 years I've spent away from academia, I still cherish what Math taught me best: looking at equivalences and I still feel the kick that I surely wouldn't want an Agent to do on my behalf. NS was never the point. And who can't see that I can only feel that they missed out.
Maybe, actually, it will rehumanize math by formulating its ideas in a manner that allow their comprehension without 10-15 years of mechanized practice. The average human might understand quantum mechanics and Maxwell’s equations with the right conceptual interface.
This. Farming used to be such a rich and meaningful job where you connected with the earth, until machinery came along and ruined it.
I loathe what's happened with agscience, all farms should be plowed by hand with donkeys and plows.
Maybe they should, you know. Maybe OpenAI is exactly working towards so that we need to do that :)
It's fascinating how people like to push any statement to its limits, because it circles around to absurdity and they believe they've made a point. Moderation seems to be chasing you, but you clearly are faster!
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Without the mechanization of book production, how many would have read his works?
So happy to see these luddites get blown out again. Tough luck Tao!
I feel like OpenAI should have secretly contacted a bunch of mathematicians and offered to give them "credit" for these "discoveries" as long as they also credited ChatGPT with helping in research. Mutual interest etc.
They tried that with Navier-Stokes. Didn't really work out.
> placed a premium on being the first to solve an open problem
Which is a simple measurable goal requiring little bureaucracy. The mythical "all you need is a pen and paper and a lifetime of dedication"
> "Math 2.0" will need to ... value mathematical progress more holistically
which is directionally the opposite
> community building ... AI can contribute positively
what is this belief based on? Any other communities can illustrate?
Math 2 looks a whole lot like software development.
I mean, he still seems to underestimate what future models will be able to do. The various directions he wants to reward are also things future models will do far better than humans. I suspect we're better suited to pursuing math like we do pleasure reading... it's enjoyable, can be useful in various situations, but we're clear-eyed that we're not gonna advance the field... and that's okay and doesn't mean it's not still worthwhile.
What's happening in the math field at the moment represents on a smaller scale the issue we (probably) will face when AI becomes smarter than us in general. Do we slow the AI down so we can understand what it does and if it's correct (and align with our values for bonus points); do we, humans, adjust the way we work to the new speed or do we give in and let the AI advance while we're not completely sure of what it does and the correctness of it. The math field is in the position of showing us the way.
I think the bigger issue is that "we" won't be doing any deciding. A handful of oligarchs will. As the technology becomes better than us, I am afraid we will learn that we are (at least seen as) technology as well. And the owner of the better technology will decide what to do with the inferior technology. I don't see anyone trying to design the roads for horse carriages, so I don't understand why would anything change for humans' understanding.
That is, if things go in the current trajectory. I don't see any reason why anything would change though.
A well-known MIT professor gave a presentation about the advancement of mathematics, back in 1965: https://youtu.be/W6OaYPVueW4
It is interesting to see that we are using this term Math 2.0 so quickly, after just a few months/year of seeming progress on previously hard problems, for something that has been around for thousands of years.
Instead of solving problems people will be solving solutions.
> "Math 2.0" will need to decenter the role of raw problem solving and value mathematical progress more holistically - for instance by elevating the role of exposition, but also that of community building and opening up new directions of study
It is interesting that AI is not yet superhuman at exposition, or at least exposition that can be understood by humans. But you haven't updated enough if you don't think that will happen soon. I'd also expect for AI to become superhuman at opening up new directions of study and theory building.
> Many fewer seminars, workshops, collaborations, or other activities are being generated from these results compared to traditional breakthroughs...the mere knowledge that a solution exists "contaminates" efforts by both humans and AI to find alternate routes to the problem that reveal additional insight
This is absurd. The mere knowledge contaminates...give me a break Tao! Of course having a (possible) solution changes how we're thinking about the problem. If that's what you mean by contaminate, fine. But if you're a person who's excited, curious, interested in mathematical knowledge for its own sake these AI results are a treasure trove. New approaches to old problems, some old approaches that we couldn't make work before. Why not whole seminars to take one of these results and dissect them, prompting the AIs to figure out where else we can use them, improving and simplifying, etc.
Look, I get Tao's anxiety. The ground is shifting and it's hard to solve for the equilibrium. How in the world do you write a grant proposal today when the person who will read it reads the headlines and thinks "math" is solved. That's something that the mathematical community will need to figure out over time. And it's possible that there'll less money for math research overall. When the marginal cost goes down, the market equilibrium changes (but don't forget Jevons paradox!). So I get the anxiety. I just expected better from some of the top people of the field.
DeepMind in the Lee Sedol days never cared about Go (the game). Similarly, OpenAI doesn't really care about math.
Most of the problems that have been solved are problems on which a great deal of progress had already been made. Those who work on well known problems posed by famous people are those who suffer the most from this. Those who do their own thing and pose new problems, on the contrary, benefit from it. Suddenly raw technical power and great memory are not so valuable as a broad perspective, structural insight, and wild ideas. Who can be successful in this new ecosystem is different. Some of the elites are (correctly) more threatened by it than some "mid tier" mathematicians. I see lots of opportunities to overcome obstacles in my research program some of which had confounded me for years.
On the other hand, it puts a premium on resources. AI is not cheap for mathematicians. Folks are fancy universities in rich countries with forward thinking ministries of science will have an advantage over the rest.
What is clearly in immediate crisis is the traditional model of doctoral education. Most of the problems that were "given" to ordinary doctoral students are solvable (quickly) even by something like Claude pro. Mathematicians need to adopt training models more like what is done in experimental and laboratory sciences - collaborative and structured.
Where Tao is wrong is in regards to exposition. AI already writes better lecture notes, problems, and exercises for mid level undergrad math classes than do most of my colleagues. It's exposition is generally well structured and clear and it can adjust level on request quite well. It writes research better than most professional mathematicians too.
why do we need mathematics? to get more grants and medals or to push frontier of humanity?
To have someone stop you in your tracks and ask you to "define" frontier of humanity.
In case you missed, Mathematics isn't about numbers and equations.
I wonder how we could formalize the notion of „interesting“ problems in a way that would allow us to automatically generate new interesting questions from the existing corpus of mathematics.
For me this path means that our role as humans is just the understanding of intelligence?
Everything else is secondary (or the last of our priorities) and would be better automated?
This is a hard pill to swallow
We should think about rejecting this AI future.
A simple way is to just measure how long it takes to solve. If it takes more than 5 minutes then we don't have a good understanding of that area and its worth potentially investing into.
Or maybe we should not let pure mathematicians decide which problems are interesting, but reward the practical applications instead.
This is wildly shortsighted view of mathematics. Historically many of the subfields of math which are presently most valuable were considered useless for decades or centuries. Number theory, non-Euclidean geometry, group theory, and Boolean algebra, to name a few.
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If you only judge by practical applications you eliminate vast swaths of human endeavor.
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I have this feeling that the frontier of maths is going to accelerate faster than humans can keep up with it, even if machines get exceptionally good at math exposition. There’ll be some event horizon of new discoveries which are so complex we’ll never understand their intermediate steps. Beyond that point, humans will revert to “Math 1.0”, where we’ll need to rediscover proofs that have already been solved by machines, and we’ll have a pair of frontiers each for the humans and the machines.
he put in an elegant way, that its not just about the solution it's about how we would leverage the AI for better good.
Which should improve collaboration, Research and Clarity.
I would really appreciate if we come up with protocols for using ai in STEM field's it might be award at first but we could regulate properly using this method.
Working heavily with LLMs for the past year has me nodding strongly with Tao's mindset.
AI only take us as far as our imagination thinks to ask it. This can be exhilarating when new models drop every month and we can continually reach a new threshold, basically for free. But it is only a one time gain and ultimately short-sighted. Where I find continuous value is using LLMs to help my understanding, full stop.
I use LLMs all day long as a SWE and I have tried many approaches, but the most satisfying and consistent approach is to lean heavily into understanding a problem space and a solution space. Yes, it whips up architecture and code, but I spend most of my time peppering it with questions about the design and how it handles certain situations, what about this edge case and that security concern and this future product need. I have it write a report breaking down the feature and how it integrates with existing code and if the report is too confusing I have it simplify either the report or the code until it makes sense to me, sometimes scaling back the work to a more manageable state. I do all of this before I look at any of the code it writes.
The difference from this approach is that I am not suffering reading through 3000 lines of AI slop but I am reviewing a PR that I fully understand. I can eyeball it quickly for anything that doesn't fit my mental model and dig deeper or quickly revise it. Only after I am happy with the bones do I consider the meat and skin of the code.
What I find most concerning is how frontier AI companies all seem to have this Math 1.0 perspective that they only want to type "solve Riemann" into the chat box and have the magic to happen. It is the same problem Google ran into, where a simple, no thinking solution serves most of the people best and most profitably, so you fully ignore or remove everything else (boolean operators, exact phrase search, verticals, filters, infinite pages of results, "nothing found" if there isn't, etc.) But that choice leads to the situation Google is in now, scrambling to stay relevant. In a different world, Google would have continuously augmented their search capabilities and eventually built a smooth, guidable AI interface.
But no, we must only have an input box and a Go button.
Everything looks like a nail when you build hammers, sell hammers, have infinite hammers to play with however you like and your company mission is to build a hammer starship to explore the hammerverse, whether or not that is even possible.
Strongly agree. I see the need to understand as back pressure on the system that produces code and features: it limits output to what fits into a working mental model. Agents could turn tickets into code much faster, but I am building a product, and it needs someone who holds that model to steer it long term.
And when the job is done, I run retrospectives on old coding-agent sessions to find areas of friction and confusion. I also journal with pen and paper, as it's supposed to bring cognitive benefits, to help me stay on top of things.
Hey, Civil Engineer here. Although I totally understand what our pure math friends are saying, I want to emphasize that the nature of math is interpreting and validating results, not doing the math. You may not be aware from the other side of your moat of very difficult or abstract concepts, but technology has been slowly removing friction and optimizing for efficiency for every other math user for a long time now. I understand that it's not fun to have AI do an aspect of your job better than you, but as perpetual students it's our job to turn the tools into progress. Also, I think that anyone standing on the "no AI in math" hill will die on it, and will die on it soon.
He is right if model intelligence stalls. If model intelligence continues to improve soon there's no need for the prompter to understand anything or for any workshop as a mathematician will just be able to ask the model to explain how the proof works and models will do a good job at walking them through it step by step.
There will be no gap in understanding. Now there is because the models are discovering things at the edge of what they can do and so suck at explaining it. There's nothing particularly special about a newly solved problem in terms of learning it.
If we accept AI can explain all of existing math nicely, why shouldn't it be able to explain new proofs?
>if model intelligence stalls. If model intelligence continues to improve
So much in AI is dependent on which of these two outcomes occur.
I am not so sure that's true. Even if AI intelligence were to plateau at today's levels, there are still many gains to be had in speeding up today's intelligences. ASICs with burned in weights could become economical to invest in as they would retain usefulness longer than 18 months, and I feel we have only scratched the surface on possible usecases of local AI and what it means for almost any technology product or interface.
If the mathematician doesn't understand anything, are they even a mathematician?
That doesn't make sense to me. Terence Tao is great at explaining things, but he could spend months explaining some of his proofs to me without me understanding it. Even if the AI had a superhuman ability to explain things it's no guarantee that it could make a human understand.
It couldn't make every human understand. But it could make Tao and other mathematicians understand. You're not going to become knowledgeable at everything suddenly, even though I doubt what you say. Many months of 1-1 tutoring and hard work from a student with a top mathematician would make you understand a lot. Just not sit down and read it first day.
It's been very interesting watching Tao's evolution on his thinking on LLMs. Of course the LLMs have themselves evolved so that shouldn't come as a surprise.
The job of professional mathematician might be the first to be completely eliminated by LLMs, save for those who can make money from a patron. I am hoping they are able to figure something out to save their profession, as other professions could use it as a blueprint as AI comes for them next.
> job of professional mathematician might be the first to be completely eliminated by LLMs
Strong disagree.
Do you work in a math adjacent field? I do and I find having a mathematician around invaluable.
It's like a non-software person writing software. Yes, using a LLM will get you to a solution that works. But just talking with a software engineer will make the quality of that solution enormously better.
I find the same with math - I can get something to work using an LLM, but if I speak to a mathematician they'll say some magic words to try and I put that in the LLM and it is "oh yes this is a much better solution".
This is very different work to generating proofs though. Its things like "I'm trying to get my confidence intervals to properly deal with census like sampling but at small sample sizes" (yes, I know stats not pure math but still..)
The main issue here is that people that are able to "Strong disagree" is shrinking with every model release, because it requires skills. So it will get more difficult to get funding.
You may say "hey, before AI people payed for math salaries even though they didnt understand the math or the economic outcome". But the issue is there are now "mathematitians" trying to convince not to fund.
In this new reality, you will get "mathematitians" trying to convince that only AI maths matter. And on the other side someone speaking about "understanding", "taste", "community". And the people deciding to fund dont have the skills to differentiate. So they will fund the AI boosters with a higher probability.
Thats how the job of professional mathematitian dissapears. By being replaced by something that on the surface looks similar, but its just an ugly copy.
Yes, I am projecting out into the future, not talking about the current state. I said "might be the first".
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Can we please not call it that
We go Math 2.0 before GTA 6
Perhaps it's the moment that the likes of Terence Tao hand over the reins to the likes of Grant Sanderson.
After seeing the cancerous monster AI "proofs" it became obvious as day that we need better abstractions in several fields. The good part is: there is still a lot left to do for humans as they actually have the abstract thinking ability, as opposed to crazy cancerous token generation.
Curiously fitting that the Pope is also a Mathematician by training. I'd imagine he agrees with Tao on the fundamental aims of mathematical research and how these proof dumps largely miss the point
I imagine doctors will also clutch their pearls when Ai starts curing disease. "But curing disease was never the point! These arbitrary dumps of AI cures for cancers is unsustainable! Who will think of the doctors and who will build their communities further? From now on progress in medicine must be redefined as what makes doctors thrive, not what generates cures!"
That's a strong contender for the worst analogy I've ever seen on HN, and it's a crowded field.
Edit: If you'd like a better medicine based one, look to radiology, where AI is an omnipresent tool but claims that radiologists are no longer needed, based on an ignorant view that a radiologist's job is "classify images according to what diseases they indicate" have only contributed to a crippling worldwide shortage of radiologists.
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I think the difference is that with cancer cures we mostly care that it works as proved by trials, and understanding it is a bonus.
Up until now the prize in pure (as opposed to applied) mathematics was the _understanding_ and the machine can't do that for you. What does it mean if we get "super powered alien maths" but humans can't do it? It's like inter univeral teichmuller theory but imagine if Mochizuki was right and it came with a lean proof?
It was the understanding for some, and the result for others. Math is going to bifurcate along those lines. Many are the builder type who use math for a purpose. To accelerate an algorithm, to improve the numerics or convergence of a computation, to verify statements about real things, to use it in angineering applications, etc etc.
In my view, over the last century, math has turned into an intellectual analogue of extreme bodybuilding competitions. A navel gazing runaway optimization in making useless stuff just to demonstrate cleverness. That's fine, why not. But society has no obligation to fund that, just as it doesn't fund other extreme hobbies. Ideally if we ever get something like UBI, math can be still their hobby.
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Doctors don't cure diseases, they treat patients.
Maybe AI will take over some roles of doctors, but that's independent of curing diseases. Think about diseases that have a cure - do people with those diseases not go see a doctor?
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> And our community will need to explicitly re-evaluate its criteria for education, publication, and career advancement, to reflect the "Math 2.0" era.
I think most academic disciplines would benefit from such a re-evaluation. AI is still a scourge on the earth, but I suppose if it spurs such changes that's a modicum of a silver lining.
Can we please stop reducing human activity to "taste", conferences, talks, "understanding"? I think this is a very unproductive trap.
There is a world where we get to the edge of AI capabilities, and we build on top of that. As humans have always done with every new technology.
There is another more pessimistic view where LLMs just replace every human capability, and our economic overlords dont need us for anything and we just eat the small pieces of bread that are left.
This comes down to the fact of:
is human existence/intelligence just the simbolic representations we make in our brain? Or are they just a tool?
I tend to think of Godels incompleteness theorem as a proof that on the limit LLMs are useless. The real question for me is at what point approaching this limit becomes an issue, and if it has any practical consequences.
>There is a world where we get to the edge of AI capabilities, and we build on top of that.
We don't build on top of that. No need for us to. AI does. That's sort of the whole point of this endeavor is it not? Humans need not apply.
I know that is the whole point. But i may dream of being as tall as a house, but it does not matter how hard i dream, it wont happen.
In my experience, every new model release allows me to go further, although every time i see every time the limitations, and i identify where i add value. And this value gets bigger every time.
But on the other hand, every model release reduces the amount of people that are able to value this "added value", because it requires more skills.
So we have the paradox that the added value i can bring on top gets bigger and bigger, but the perception of the economic value for the majority of the population gets smaller.
Related:
AHM Statement on OpenAI's October 6 Release of Mathematical Documents
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49999159
I would argue the problem is not AI, but putting value on proofs by mathematics community. They're not fully to blame, part of it is need of billionaires (and other elites) to appear educated, and the general status culture that sees mathematics as something that needs to be socially justified.
Grigori Perelman warned about this when he refused the Millenium problem prize. He understood mathematics should be a journey, not a destination.
I think it's disappointing [1] for a group of people (however smart they are, whatever titles and fame they have) to think they are the gatekeepers of mathematics, the core of human knowledge. In this respect "mathematics is what mathematicians do" is no longer true, perhaps it was never a useful thing to say. Mathematics is (downstream) consumed in some shape or form by every human on Earth, and no elite, appointed group gets to decide how new mathematics is created. I feel this is a reaction to the sting of the reality check for these people, who are gifted with amazing genetics, and can think faster and deeper than other humans, that their gifts are relative to humans, and machines can still outdo them.. but this is already true for so many other areas, from physical strength to playing chess. Also, I feel this reaction is just non-sensical, it reminds me of when commercial software company CEOs [2] said open source is communism in the early 2000s, because they felt open source is threating their business model.
Lastly, deep down I don't really get what mathematicians are so upset about. All open problems, once solved, are not solved by 99.9999% of mathematicians, because it's solved by one or a handful of others, and the others just learn of the solution/proof. Mathematicians can now still organize conferences about these proofs, discuss them, digest them, think of new avenues of research, etc. They don't even have to invite OpenAI, in 6 months whatever model is available on chatgpt.com will be this smart anyway, and they can use it in the workshops for explanations, etc.
[1] I was going to write "I'm a bit disappointed by the response of the math community..", but then I remembered, whatever T. Tao writes is not the position of the math community, it's his position. Then I was going to write "I'm a bit disappointed by the response of T. Tao..", but then I remembered, I don't know Tao personally, so why am I disappointed?
[2] Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, I believe
""Math 1.0" placed a premium on being the first to solve an open problem, even if the solution was not initially well understood"
Arbitrary conclusion. This is the corporate take on "mathematics"
Mathematics were meant to further our understanding of nature and solve people's problem. Not to serve corporate delusional CEOs for their psychopathic purposes.
"Taste"
I get bonked for saying this again and again, because people get annoyed with an oversimplified analogy or the use of whateverfallacy,
but can someone please try to set aside their knee-jerk reactions for a while to give a good reason:
× You don't know how to farm — That doesn't prevent you from having food or cooking good meals.
× You don't know how to mine raw materials — That doesn't prevent you from using computers/phones made with aluminum, copper, glass etc.
× You don't know how to fell trees and shape lumber — That doesn't prevent you from sitting in that comfy chair.
× You don't know assembly language or how to write operating systems — That doesn't prevent you from using Windows or macOS or Linux.
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EVERYDAY you use hundreds of things made from THOUSANDS of technologies you don't understand, because other people already MASTERED them.
so YOU can go on to go do GREATER things.
(but you CAN still go do farming, mining, logging, writing your own OS, if you ENJOY it — nothing's stopping you — you just won't be as good as the technology that has been specialized for that over centuries, and almost certainly you won't be bringing anything new to those fields, and it'll take time away from doing other things.)
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Maybe we shouldn't be wasting time on "oshit how do we uninvent or slow down this new technology because it makes things easier than what we grew up on"
and focus more on "what other greater things can we move on to?"
There's a whole freakin universe out there and we haven't even stepped off our home planet yet.
Firstly I'd point out that the difference here is that all of those things you mentioned are things you could learn and the distinction would be that at least currently the proofs provided by AI are inscrutable. Although this will probably change.
The second thing is to just ask what is there left to do. What are these "greater things" that people can dedicate time to, when clearly even classically cerebral activities like mathematics can be automated away. The industrial revolution already wrecked physical production of goods and made artisan workers obsolete outside of extremely niche scenarios -- that's why we call things artisanal, after all -- but there was still mental work. But now, mental work is also experiencing the same thing, and it's not clear what one should do as a human anymore.
And some people seem outright gleeful about these developments, which can be seen even in this thread. What happens when humanity becomes obsolete? And what happens when the machines that cause this obsolescence are controlled by a tiny amount of people, who suddenly don't need the rest of us? I can only hope that this turns out well for us and that with the development of these machines, humanity will get better, but the omnipresent existential dread is giving me doubts.
> What are these "greater things" that people can dedicate time to, when clearly even classically cerebral activities like mathematics can be automated away.
Their applications?
For example I'm not a mathematician but I love thinking about weird "useless" shit like how math might be like for aliens? Are numbers as fundamental as we assume? i.e. humans developed math for "arithmetic" first, then latched geometry etc on top of that. We took ages to admit zero and negative numbers.. what if an alien species develops math for "navigation" first, and starts out with complex numbers right away!?
> What happens when humanity becomes obsolete?
There's an infinity out there to explore.
> And what happens when the machines that cause this obsolescence are controlled by a tiny amount of people, who suddenly don't need the rest of us?
That's a social problem we needed to tackle more than 100 years before AI or even computers appeared.
Apparently the minutes hand was added to clock to keep time in factories, for the benefit of the factory owners, not the workers — something I learned from this 1991 show from the BBC with Terry Jones: "So This Is Progress" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Em96NVxO9Q
But I am good at one skill that I spent years studying/training for, and now that skill is not paying the bills.
At least, that's how I view most discussions on AI adoption. Technological advancements are great for humanity, but that doesn't mean it comes without costs. The luddites are a famous example that's very often mentioned in this forum.
And no, "reskilling" isn't an option for many people. If you are poor, if you have a family or have people dependent on you, you cannot put your life on pause to learn something new, especially if you have no guarantees it won't end up like last time.
> and now that skill is not paying the bills. ... you cannot put your life on pause to learn something new
Yes, but that's a social issue, external to technology but exacerbated by every new technology, AI or not:
UBI should be a thing: let people work on what they find fulfilling, instead of having to work to survive.
AI could help design a system for UBI that everyone agrees with, since it's so good at maths and shit now.
This problem HAS to be tackled. Removing/slowing AI will only kick it further down the road, not eliminate it.
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People knowing things represents redundancy. It has long been a fear around technology that humans would lose the knowledge and if the technology fails or is somehow taken away, be helpless.
This is what underpins the fear, I think.
You don't know how to farm but mentally you rest easy knowing a lot of other people do know. You also know there are books you could read to learn, if you needed to. Most things are like this, you could bootstrap your way to casting metals and probably even electric lights with only books and raw materials. Computer chips don't have this property.
Personally this is why I'd like to see libraries survive, even though I actually mostly read on my e-reader. I guess I took Anathem to heart.
This is all reasonable of course, and I think you're have to be pretty cold-hearted to disagree too vociferously. What OpenAI did (opening an announcement by name-dropping the exact institution that told them not to, implying they got buy-in) is just objectively bad-faith, and more of the same from Mr. Altman.
Mathematics is an academy, and academies are human assemblages for producing truth (and the tools therein); they will stop producing if we forget to repair and refine them. It's just undeniable in the abstract.
(Sorry for the length, cut it as much as I could; mod(s) remove if you'd like. Talking to myself in the shadow of giants is how I'm coping with the ennui, I think.) That said, four philosophy nits on paradigms, scope, motivation, and pride:
1. Paradigms | The 'Math 1.0' rhetoric is undeniably powerful, but it makes it seem like he's unaware of his standpoint[1] by lumping all of "traditional mathematics" together. At the very least we've gone through four methodological revolutions in math, each one changing how the field is done on a fundamental level: ??? => Euclidean Certainty => Aristotlean Computation (~800s) => ~Newtonian Calculation (1600s) => ~Gaussian Systems (~1850s), and perhaps one in the 20th c. I lack the expertise to even gesture at. We also have clear analogues from parts of the other two acadamies in the 20th century alone: physics becoming an arcane, inelegant group effort in the ~1920s, and mainstream philosophy adopting a cloud of Kiki ideas vaguely revolving around Wittgeinstein & Chomsky in the ~1960s.
I totally understand this being distressing, especially when it's happening quickly. They, too, had people decrying the future of their fields. But we wouldn't obviously wouldn't change it, in hindsight; much of modern physics would be completely intractable without those strange, boring, unnerving methods, for example. More than intractable: unthinkable.
2. Scope | This all seems overly focused on Autumn 2026. Most egregiously, this is all built on the premise that RSI never happens, and we never acheive ASI. If we do, mathematics is almost assuredly A) the first academy to be completely outmoded, and B) the least of our problems. I cut a long thing about the caveats and effects here; at this point... if you know, you know.
3. Motivation | Ultimately this thread is focusing on human motivation throughout, a fact that would be more forgivable if acknowledged as an intentional tradeoff. Speculating that it'll be harder to have interest in math is just not worth withholding truth; for one thing, knowing that computers could solve a problem but it's banned to try would ruin motivation anyway, and worse. It's up to us to be motivated, and if I know us, we'll have no problem doing so as long as there's any utility there at all.
In more stark terms: trading progress in the fundamental academy for the sake of its current methods of recruitment and motivation seems like something posterity will almost definitely frown upon.
4. Pride | This is the common thread that weaves through all three preceeding points, I think, and is even stated in pretty blatant terms (that's Tao -- always a clear writer!):
Sure, his thesis acknowledges that some changes are welcome, but not radical ones; his tone implies tweaks to conference schedules and authorship norms rather than fundamental restructuring of what these professions are, and what it's like to dedicate one's life to the demos through them.
Doing science (mathematic or otherwise) in this competitive, individualistic way is just clearly counterintuitive to me, even if it weren't a recent development. Imagine taking it to its conclusion and applying some kind of patent system to mathematics -- or even worse, copyright to combinations of symbols! Perhaps more riches would motivate some mathematicians, but it would so obviously eat away at the democratic principles that have brought us unimaginably far over the past 406 years.
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TL;DR: What worked well for the past ~century is not particularly relevant, and I think Tao is missing the forest here, despite one of the best sylvan trailblazers around. On his side practically-speaking for heuristic and contingent reasons, regardless.
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I think we can say by now that we should not listen to the early nay-sayers and just wait a bit. With every trend, not just "AI". They still have some points (the ethics and environment etc), but the we don't hear from the Stochastic Parrot folks anymore.
Of course it's good to have the discussion... So maybe, we listen to the nay-sayers, but defer judgement on the matter... That's wisdom.
Edit, to be clear, I consider Tao to be the wisdom provider, not an early nay-sayer!
Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus are still at it - the latter having shifted goalposts.
Yann LeCun's criticisms are at least balanced with an alternative approach he has teams actively working on and showing good progress in areas LLMs are weak.
The less said about Gary Marcus the better.
Gary Marcus has has a long career now of shifting goalposts
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Tao was not an early nay-sayer.
If anything he is very pro-AI and far from a naysayer. Labelling anyone who doesn't isn't Linkedin style "stoked" "excited" about AI is not helpful.
This is a technology not like prior technologies. Are we okay if the technology discourages a whole generation of Mathematicians? If the technology leads to 10x fewer mathematicians -- what impact does that have on the field? These are the questions Tao is asking. And I don't think he himself claims to have all the answers, he just doesn't wanna see the math _community_ die.
Certainly not implying that! He's the one with the deferred judgement and the wisdom.
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“doing math responsibly” is just a euphemism for “ensuring we can continue doing our paid hobby”.
Take a look at this interview from two days ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oQypVVv1u1o
The interviewee is worried about the future of math research. He is not strictly worried about being replaced, instead he is worried that he will no longer be able to launder math-as-a-hobby through math-as-something-useful as is the case today. He lays out very clearly that grant proposals claim to have useful outcomes while the proposers know those claims are nonsense.
Business as usual in math, and frankly in all the other sciences, is to do research that furthers the researchers careers or personal interests and pretend that it’s somehow useful. This would be absolutely fine if it were privately funded, but it’s not, this is public money.
In every other endeavour, lying in order to get money is considered fraud.
We have collectively wasted a huge amount of taxpayer money and human time, entire careers, on things not likely to ever matter to anyone.
I look forward to science becoming automated so that we can have real progress instead of the current broken system.
usefulness can only be determined after the fact.
People thought, back in the 17 century, that imaginary were useless (except as a trick for some calculations). Turns out the research into these numbers back then is amazingly useful today, 300 years later, in electronics and such.
Publicly funded maths research should continue, even if some taxpayers feel it's a waste of money.
Nobody determined the usefulness of the internal combustion engine or the aeroplane after the fact. They were goals specifically worked towards. For every useful discovery that comes from this hobbyist approach there are far more that aren’t, and those would have been discovered during a goal orientated research program.
However, with AI it actually may become so cheap that the scattergun random approach becomes more viable rather than less. It’s when human time and resources are scarce that you need to optimise. The hobbyist approach may therefore ironically continue, but without the hobbyists.
> Publicly funded maths research should continue, even if some taxpayers feel it's a waste of money.
Note, I think the debate is mainly over what research should be funded, not whether any research should be funded.
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> usefulness can only be determined after the fact.
Thats great! So in other words it should be perfectly fine for AI to solve all of the supposedly useless math problems so that it might possibly be useful later. No need to worry about the mathematicians hobbies here.
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> look forward to science becoming automated so that we can have real progress instead of the current broken system
Do you really think a society with zero human mathematicians or scientists will outperform one with both human and AI ones?
Actually yes, I think that AI will end up in a place where additional human effort, even at the highest level of suggesting what directions to look in, will become a rounding error compared to what the AI will achieve by itself.
So as measured by utility, I absolutely believe we don’t need humans doing science into the future. I’m sure people will continue doing it, but not for utility, for enjoyment - as a hobby. Probably we’ll all end up as dedicated hobbyists.
>We have collectively wasted a huge amount of taxpayer money and human time, entire careers, on things not likely to ever matter to anyone.
How much..?
The software equivalent of this is claiming that game development is laundering software as hobby. Absurd.
Haha. That’s almost verbatim what the guy said. Here, let me grab that for you:
> things that I do and that my colleagues do, this kind of like curiosity-driven, you know, applied math, computational physics type research has always been justified by, I would argue, intentionally blurring the line between what I would call, you know, science as product versus science as process
> science as product is very kind of clear-cut. It’s, you know, things like, you know, cure cancer, solve nuclear fusion, generate, you know, clean energy.
> And then there’s science as process, which is kind of the curiosity-driven stuff about, you know, like, “I want to understand protein folding,” or, “I want to understand, you know, turbulence,” or, “I want to understand quantum gravity,” or something. And broadly speaking, we have tended to justify the latter by kind of laundering it through the former
And the examples he gives are actually the more defensible ones, he talks about a friend of his working on some abstract algebra under the false guise of cryptography research later.
And it’s not just him saying it, this is simply true. He should be lauded for admitting it publicly, this is the only way any progress is made. At least, it used to be. Now it’ll be AI instead.
The whole point of public funding for science is that seemingly pointless research yields useful but hard to monetize discoveries. Otherwise VCs would be doing it.
I feel like there first will be a lot of rationalizations, hamd-wringing, and existential tummy aches, but then the eventual resigned acknowledgment (just like in Chess), that humans do math because they like to do math, not because humans will ever again be as good as computers are at math, then come to make discernments between human math proofs, and the work of an engine, maybe they'll even start start doing proofs on short time controls and stream it on Twitch.
Because the other solutions are to a) quite literally become inhuman, with cyborg integrated TPUs running local models and networked interfaces to propierary models run in data centers, or b) assert dominance of human ignorance by burning civilization down, which doesn't sound pleasant.
I suspect the whole field of mathematics will simply disappear as a career path. It seems obvious that the trajectory is for the machines to be able to provide proof on demand for any solvable problem. Whether or not the proof is understandable by humans is perhaps irrelevant in the larger sense. Doing hard math will simply become another black box tool in the larger AI toolkit for goal optimisation. Is this sad and should we try to prevent it? Is it any less sad than the venerable London cabbie who spent a life time memorising every street to gain "the knowledge" and almost overnight supplanted by machine intelligence.
> the whole field of mathematics will simply disappear as a career path
Almost certainly not. It's just going to jump to a higher level of abstraction.
It's already unbelievably abstract as it is...
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Did the London cabbies explore unknown territories to find new streets to memorize ?