Comment by ijustlovemath
1 hour ago
I think that on closer inspection, a lot of these fully AI generated proofs will fall apart. Even in Lean, you can build theories which compile but nonetheless state something different than what you actually intend. It's just that the volume of proof is so staggeringly large that it will probably take years before we find the issues, a la abc conjecture
I feel this comment is based on a misunderstanding of how Lean works. In Lean you don't need to inspect the proof. There is no "closer inspection". All the human needs to verify is that the statement of the theorem is translated correctly from natural language to Lean. That usually covers a very small surface of the Lean code.
How much lean code do you need to read to check if NAvier-Stokes was correctly formalized?
Many of the statements were already there and looked over by the community in lean prior to the work though, the statement can get formalized before the proof of it.
I just think that with the vast amounts of compute involved and the tendency to reward hack, we can't assume the steps towards that formalization are without error until full human understanding of the formalization.
Repeating the above comment: most of the statements were already formalized prior OpenAI's work. So no, the statements were not "reward hacked".
1. why can’t the so called “real mathematicians” (as if mathematics does not belong to all of us) write the lean theorems by hand and then we let the machine fill the rest in? They are very upset that they can no longer contribute to frontier mathematics. This would let them contribute.
2. Why shouldn’t math progress happen in the open, commit by commit? Why is it so horrible if a proof is 95% of the way there but we later find that it needs to be refined? Mathematics previously was optimizing for an antiquated publishing and distribution scheme. There is no need for the first print to be correct. We have the internet now. We can and should publish incomplete results and correct things on the fly. Maybe mathematicians would have solved some of these problems years ago if they didn’t hide incomplete almost solutions in their filing cabinet because it wasn’t yet ready to be published.
You don’t hate the pageantry of mathematics and academics enough.
About your second point.
I bet you enjoy when a peer asks you to find the issues in a fully AI generated PR that’s 95% of the way there.
What are you even saying. Mathematics largely happens “commit by commit” as insufferable as that is a way of saying it, via conferences and meetings and prepublications. You’re attributing some bizarre to morality how mathematicians operate. You’re just upset people aren’t playing at your playground enough to your liking.
Also “real mathematicians” aren’t the people who “math belongs to”, you’re a mathematician if you do math, that’s it.
I mean 95% of a proof is not a proof, and the fact that we got 95% of the way there isn't necessarily an indication that we'll ever get there. There's also a big difference between publishing a mostly-done proof as such and publishing a proof as complete only to retract later.
There's a lot to hate about the academic world, but the solution isn't spewing out terabytes of crappy half-baked results.