Comment by killerstorm
9 hours ago
> 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.
OpenAI does not make money from math papers LOL they just release them for the sake of community. (Because sitting on those results would be considered worse.)
You don't seem to understand how the company evaluation and perception works. I would suggest reading on that.
> This does not affect people building new theories.
Actually, the problem is, somehow the skill of building new theories in math is directly tied to slaving hard over a problem. It's the very experience of slaving away that actually somehow causes ideas to form. Pretty much all mathematicians understand this. Yes, senior mathematicians now can form some new theories, but what about junior ones who will have very little experience in working hard on a problem by hand?
Of course, they could work on the problem by hand anyway, but they won't because no one will pay them when a machine can do it.
> no one will pay them when a machine can do it.
Let's start with the fact that mathematicians aren't paid for results. Institution which gives them salary fundamentally doesn't give a fuck about theorems. They might care about having top-grade mathematicians for prestige, or because they believe that countries which are "good at math" also do better in science, engineering, etc.
> somehow the skill of building new theories in math is directly tied to slaving hard over a problem
We don't know if that's the only way. Perhaps collaboration with AI is just as good. Why reject it before it has been tried?
> what about junior ones
Junior guy with brilliant new ideas might benefit the most from AI as it can compensate for lacking technical chops and breadth of knowledge.