Comment by vatsachak
4 days ago
Hacker News is so depressing these days. One doomer post per day to keep the valuations up.
Nothing has changed in math. Math is not solved nor has the human been kicked out of the loop. Same with programming.
*I said nothing really changed because LLMs becoming superhuman at deduction was priced in with o3 and neither the peer review, training nor publishing methods will get a revamp beyond what could already be done with SQLite and a website.
I'm no mathematician, but my impression as someone who at least does a lot of applied work with maths is that the main thing that's changed is that the yardstick by which academics earn recognition is being re-assessed.
But from my perspective proofs have never been the most interesting part of maths. What really interests me is the intuition that leads to new applications, and to new questions. Newton, for example, gets more credit for calculus than Leibniz because he's the one who demonstrated how darned useful it is. Erdos is arguably more famous for asking interesting questions than for answering them.
I still don't see LLMs seriously contributing to that facet of mathematics any time soon. Every so often I ask one to suggest a good binomial confidence interval for a particular application, and it still tends to just suggest one of the subpar options that everyone learns in a first year stats course.
Proving theorems is one of the main ways that mathematicians turn math into money.
The recent barf-out done by LLM companies is useful if what are you are interested in is an unreadable mess and someone giving you the final answer. You might be able to extract some new "aha!" moments out of it, but we will have to wait and see what happens once people go through it. I would hypothesize the LLM output will be good at hinting at some non-obvious relationships and patterns, but I doubt it will yield anything of substance in its own right.
Historically, proving difficult theorems required mathematicians to sometimes invent new fields, new ways of looking at problems, the discovery of which itself yielded incalculable contributions to both mathematics and other fields. It is this that is the greater contribution of and to mathematics.
> Proving theorems is one of the main ways that mathematicians turn math into money.
Mathematicians working at universities are paid to teach, to engage in the politics and business of government contracting, and only in very rare circumstances to play prestige games on famous problems.
It is unlikely that Congress will decide to slash budget for NSF's MPS directorate on account of AI getting good at proving theorems. That's just not how Congress works.
It is also unlikely that LLMs will be able to do, in the near future, do the sort of applied mathematics that happens in the context of occasional NIH or DoD funding that flows into Mathematics departments, for a variety of complex sociological reasons I'm happy to expound upon.
And it's unlikely Engineering degree programs will stop requiring calculus sequences, since being able to do the computation was has not been the actual point of teaching calc since he late 20th century (if ever).
So, the good news is that I doubt any of this will have much of an effect on the job market for Mathematicians who want to prove theorems for a living. The bad news, of course, is that the job market for Mathematicians who want to prove theorems for a living was already pretty horrendous.
I’m on your side on this overall, I think. And I suspect we’d agree more than disagree on nuances. But saying that ‘nothing has changed’ is very obviously wrong.
I guess I chose the words "nothing has changed" because that's true relative to all the subtext of content I'm seeing online claiming that "math is solved"
I think the https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50043026 Terence Tao post was much more hopeful and along the lines you're suggesting.
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I agree with "nothing has changed" in practical terms. If you take a look around most things rely on an undergraduate level of math than whatever is at the frontier. The proofs may be important, but they are really remote to people's lives.
This is like saying WW2 didnt happen while you were living in a Soviet village in 1940s, and you were doing the same thing, and nothing seemed to change
Go apply for some jobs. You’ll quickly come to the realization that something has changed.
And this is only the beginning.
And how! All the “nothing has changed, stop whining posts” are neglecting that they haven’t had to go look for a job. My previous company became quite toxic about LLMs and employee usage. It’s not “move over to the paradigm or get left behind” instead it was “jump on the hype-wagon and sing LLM’s praises all day, every day or you’re out”.
Yes, interest rates are higher than ever and consumer sentiment makes business wary
ZIRP is over but rates are not especially high and yet I don’t remember job market being that bad. Maybe employers are taking wait and see approach and avoid hiring developers they expect to layoff in a year or two if models will continue to improve and becoming cheaper at the current pace.
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Interest rates are higher because AI.
It was long predicted that the sign that AI is here in macroeconomics is rising interest rates, because investors can get MUCH higher rates of return doing AI investments than borrowing governments, why would I lend money to Greece when I can lend it to Anthropic?
I own my company and directly participate hiring. What’s changed among me and my peers is that we’re on incredibly precarious economic grounds with no telling what’s going to happen next month.
LLMs haven’t done much in the way of informing me or others I know regarding “who and how many”.
I’ve done some hiring lately as well and we got a ridiculous number of applications, like 500+ for a run-of-the-mill developer job.
I’ve worked in tech for 20+ years and I’ve never seen it like this. Sure there are job openings, but sooo many applicants it seems.
(This is Sweden, YMMV.)
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The fear is the sales pitch. AI has some uses but nowhere near enough to justify the price tag, so we need something more to sell it.
Fear and FOMO mainly.
Re depression: Seems like it is not just HN... You say nothing changed. Maybe that's even true.
But many people perceive this very differently, see link below. And perception is reality after all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50093180
Yes I take issue with all the anti-human propaganda coming out. I think that there will be a future we're essentially replaced but it's not now
The doom posts will continue until profits are up.
Jokes aside, its like working for a company, individually you can lift mountains and someone else will take credit. When you use LLMs for a single bit, all credit goes to LLMs lol
> Math is not solved nor has the human been kicked out of the loop. Same with programming.
Is it like Chess and Go? There are still plenty of people playing for fun, but the machines are better at it than we are.
Nah, see my other comment in this thread with actual technical issues with the math dump and how math =/= deduction
Mathematics as a field of study is maybe 2500 years old and a lot has been figured out in that time. But look how far AIs have come in just ten years. I wouldn't expect progress to stop now, would you? A decade from now I wouldn't be surprised if machine mathematicians are essentially oracles. They tell us the answer but can't explain it to us any more than you could explain long division to a golden retriever.
yeah nothing changed in math. mathematicians are weeping for some strange reason (maybe paid by OpenAI to weep?). And Terry Tao is posting blogs on AI + Mathematics because he was bored (or because he was also paid by OpenAI).
They are overreacting imo. A lot of mathematicians stuck their head in the sand with o3 but this was the logical outcome; superhuman deduction
Disagree, there are in fact documented cases.
> I think I have been underrating the pace of model improvements. In March 2025 I made a bet with Tamay Besiroglu, cofounder of RL environment company Mechanize, that AI tools would not be able to autonomously produce papers I judge to be at a level comparable to that of the best few papers published in 2025, at comparable cost to human experts, by 2030. I gave him 3:1 odds at the time; I now expect to lose this bet.
https://www.daniellitt.com/blog/2026/2/20/mathematics-in-the...
“I’ve slowly updated my timelines over the past year…”
and
“I think I have been underrating the pace of model improvements. … I was not correctly calibrated as to the capabilities of existing models, let alone near-future models.”
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I don't get the argument - if we follow what you say, they're not _overreacting_, they are reacting appropriately but should have done so earlier (when o3 was released) rather than now?
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This was the top comments when the submission disappeared from the front page.
Now the thread has been cleaned up and a pro-defeatism comment is the top comment and the submission is on the front page again (I'm not alleging moderator intervention, user mechanisms are sufficient).
> One doomer post per day to keep the valuations up.
Wow that's very well worded.
It's probably because with the release of each model it is becoming more and more difficult to see how a person's livelihood and way of life continues. Uncertainty stacked on uncertainty.
How will it pan out, no one really knows. The leading frontier labs are continuing to hire aggressively. But who knows for how long or for long or near-term goals.
The open ai math dump was actually what got me off the singularity wagon.
There were mistakes that could easily be seen with a diagram rendering three big results wrong, exposition is terrible, no coherent underlying theory generated from solving so many problems, as Thomas Bloom pointed out even duplicate proofs of the same statement in a single paper.
It clicked for me, "this is slop but slop can be superhuman and useful!". Similar to programming where it can generate as many criticisms of your codebase but you have to weed them out.
If anything, that makes the case that math is fucked even stronger. Nobody had any idea of how to prove quasi-Riemann. OpenAI produced three proofs, one of which was just a lemma in solving another problem. They have a machine that is better than every human being alive at math that solves problems humans cannot even when working inefficiently.
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I'm sorry, but "nothing has changed in math" is a truly ridiculous statement.
Sure, there are people who overstate things. But that isn't an excuse to keep your head in the sand.
o3 already had this priced in amongst many mathematicians I talked to at conferences
You use the word "already" as if it already happened, but this is confusing speculation with reality. Market prices are a summary of speculation. Plenty of things are "priced in" that haven't happened yet, and maybe won't if the market is wrong.
Anticipating that something will happen is not the same as evidence that it's happened.
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Doesn't seem to be the case here: https://www.daniellitt.com/blog/2026/2/20/mathematics-in-the...
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my doomerism isn't about keeping valuations up, it's about tearing it down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II
the above, a "sorting" machine is the primary usage of hyperscalers currently, they're just trying to find new uses to boot for extra money/legitimation.
the browser industry the phone industry the CAs JavaScript
it's all paid for by those wanting to sort humanity into whatever bucket the can fear monger the peasantry into for aweek or however long it takes the classification system to sort out.
gentrification works, but we chose forcible displacement now we have to live with the forever consequences.
would you give guns and bombs to the displaced native americans who taste blood over their beads and trinkets?
we've been inside the event horizon of the singularity for years, the tax bill will only get worse unless we recognize it for the tick that it is.
> One doomer post per day to keep the valuations up.
Yes, outsiders (investors, journalists) are given a false impression while insiders (software engineers) are supposed to give up. Double win for the agitprop machine.
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> Xi's minions are watching.
Sometimes you think you’ve been accused of everything you could be accused of. Wonders never cease!
> The "moderation by less", as well as the guidelines, are both farcical in nature. They've given way to ruination of an otherwise decent tech discussion forum
The guidelines have been constant (with minor updates) for most of the two decades HN has existed. Dan’s a moderator for 14 years and I’ve been one for several. Both of us have been active participants almost since the beginning. When did the ruination begin?
Your comment seems a generic vent, largely unrelated to the parent comment but if you have any actionable suggestions you’re welcome to email us.
> Your comment seems a generic vent, largely unrelated to the parent comment
There it is, the "off topic" play. Well done, Tom.
If you'd put anywhere near the amount of attention in moderating the site for over all quality that you put into my "largely unrelated" comment, this entire comment thread would not exist. Think it over.
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> lobsters
Never been invited, but I've also never felt smart enough for that community. I'm glad I can read it though!
TBH I come to HN to understand US silicon valley mindset. difficult to get a more distilled version of that in other places.
FWIW as someone in silicon valley, this really isn't the silicon valley mindset. HN represents a sort of messy combination of many different tech tribes, but I will say its depiction of silicon valley is largely that of someone who reads too much tabloid coverage of it. It's very much the feeling one gets about silicon valley by reading Techcrunch articles without actually being here.
I actually think it's a bit dangerous to try and understand SV from HN comments, in the same way that trying to learn about an event by watching a fictional adaptation of it can often confuse more than educate. The goal of the comments here aren't for SV to chat anymore and it hasn't been for a very long time, for better or for worse.
Twitter is closer to what you'll get among founder and hype circles in silicon valley, but even that isn't a good pulse of what engineers here actually think. The public web is just too adversarial a place for most folks to want to hang out anymore and silicon valley has been so deeply politicized in the news that a lot of people just don't want to air their opinions in public anymore. My suggestion is to save up some money and just come here and visit for a week or two, go to events, rant to a few graybeards, that kind of thing. You'll get a much more authentic look.
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Am, this is 80% Indians with most of them from India.
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