Comment by alexwebb2

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?

Mathematics is less about the end product and having a healthy community of people to actually understand the proofs and eventually apply them.

That community won't exist as many people simply won't even enter the field because it's reprehensible and contemptible, not to mention boring, just to read machine-generated proofs and verify them.

Collaborating on, or at least working on unsolved problems is what motivates most people.

AI is like a cheat code in a video game. You get to the end faster but fewer people want to play if the cheat code is always on. You can't turn it off either because the very challenge is to do something unique.

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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