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Comment by jacquesm

4 days ago

We're not so far from 'you never had some god given right to be alive, well fed and sheltered. You have a good body, make yourself useful in some industry.'

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jacquesm

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danielmarkbruce  4 days ago

We are miles away from that.

Math proofs are right in the sweet spot for training LLMs with RLVR. It isn't some general "LLMs are getting insanely smart!". Even most software development itself is miles away from being as well suited to training as math proofs are.

The majority of math research is akin to professional chess. Completely useless and the folks doing it are using their giant brains to play a game that no one outside themselves benefits from.

  • qbit42  4 days ago

    For what it's worth, most mathematicians are paid to teach, and the amount of research funding going into mathematics is relatively small. Plus, there are rare but important broader advancements due to pure and applied math that are hard to predict in advance (e.g., cryptography, compressed sensing).

    Mathematicians also decide what to prove in their research - taste is not a skill we have RLVR'd away (yet, not claiming this is fundamental).

    Of course, the field is being fundamentally transformed, it will probably end up looking more like experimental science in the future.

    • cloudbonsai  4 days ago

      Do you think it’s possible to operate math research in a fully autonomous way (i.e. with no human expert involvement)?

      As a software engineer, my mental model so far is that OpenAI made a gigantic (but potentially sound) pull request to the math community, and the mathematicians just did not have enough bandwidth to review and merge it.

      If my model is correct, I guess it makes a lot of sense to fund mathematicians, because their lack of resource is the bottleneck here.

      3 replies →

  • jacquesm  4 days ago

    The bulk of the people on this planet do not make their money in advanced math but in mundane jobs that are well within the capabilities of AI as it is today. It will take some time to figure out how to put it all together but all of those jobs are on borrowed time unless there is some kind of regulatory action to stop that from happening.

    • danielmarkbruce  4 days ago

      Perhaps. But as someone who uses AI to automate something that seems in the bucket of things you are talking about - it's harder than it seems, the edge cases are endless, claude code is worse at building real systems than people think and humans are doing a lot more than people realize once you start trying to automate.

      All I'm saying is the math advances of late really hasn't changed much outside of math as far as AI is concerned.

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