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Comment by yipinwong

4 days ago

One of the driving forces of math achievement is an internal award (yes, friggin business speak).

The vanity, fame, self-improvement, it's very selfish as everyone does.

Now the fame coming from proving things like Riemann Hypothesis is taken away. Self-improvement? relying on AIs make you stupid. It will be lost. Vanity? Who else don't know how to use AIs? It cannot fill your void.

Now also the most important thing is the communication.

There will be less communications amongst mathematicians at least in person. On paper? maybe but mostly via AIs.

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yipinwong

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itsalwaysgood  4 days ago

I don't think it's the communication that's lost, it's the motivation. People love to collaborate, but they don't always want to waste time doing it.

It's the same reason you see 'no AI' repo labels: only by forcing some standard on the community can the 'old way of collaborating' continue to exist.

There will for sure be new ways of collaborating, and walled off gardens like you suggest, where communication stops and everyone just shares some final product.

But, in some cases the product must be understood (or demonstrated) before value can be derived, and so collaboration will still exist.

Desire, and the 'shape' of collaboration has changed greatly though. Why collaboration has changed, is a completely separate issue related to economy and how each of us spends our time.

  • yipinwong  4 days ago

    ty. Good points in general.

    > There will for sure be new ways of collaborating

    I am not smart enough to know what the new ways will be but there should be one to adapt to changes.

omnicognate  4 days ago

The fame from solving the Riemann Hypothesis has not been taken away. It's still open.

  • itsalwaysgood  4 days ago

    Desire and motivation are factors to consider. Would you want to invest 5 years of effort into solving the Hypothesis 'the old way', knowing someone is probably working on it right now with AI?

    And then once it's solved by AI: do you want to churn through the proof to understand it? What if it takes you 5 years to churn through the proof, and it turns out someone made a mistake with AI (I have no idea what would be realistic amounts of time, but the idea is still worth considering).

    The issue is very complex, and you will always be hungry.

    • omnicognate  4 days ago

      For sure, I just wanted to correct the impression that it has been solved. There are a lot of people going around pretending LLMs have solved everything and human maths is over, but what has been achieved with them so far, while impressive, is a very, very long way short of that.

      If I were a mathematician working on the Riemann Hypothesis, I'd probably be rather pissed off right now but continuing my work, i.e. the same as I am as a software developer.

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