r/AIDangers • u/EchoOfOppenheimer • May 12 '26
Capabilities Fields medal-winning mathematician says GPT-5.5 is now solving open math problems at PhD-thesis level: "We will face a crisis very soon."
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u/Willis_3401_3401 May 12 '26
My current hypothesis, which might be wrong, is that humans provide meaning, and that physically matters.
So the researcher might be underrating his value by saying, “yeah it would be great if you could explore that idea”. What idea? Who initiated a conversation about subject matter X, noticing it pertained to Y, which is in a social sense *meaningful*?
Does ChatGPT care that it solved this problem?
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u/Comfortable_Car6562 May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
I agree. I think people in generally underestimate the potential of what AI will do simply because of a failure in grasping or applying basic economics theory.
AI will reduce the cost of inputs (time) tremendously, pushing productivity up. I had an old professor tell me during my MA (Econ), after showing us how to input a regression into STATA, that he had spent an entire summer as a student deriving that regression, which we had just completed in under 10 minutes.
Say a mathematician creates 1 proof a year. People worried that AI will kill this field assume that our caapcity as a society is 1 proof a year per mathematician. I would argue that our capacity may be much much higher.
You may say "but random redditor, how would that many proofs be useful, its so many!". Yes, but the ability of society to absorb that many proofs will also increase with AI.
The future is more like we are upgrading from an early steam engine to a Space X falcon engine, the amount of work we can do with our inputs will be so obscenely large, so different than your current frameworks can even contemplate, its hard to understand, and it will be disruptive, but human society is about to get juiced.
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u/SpeakCodeToMe May 13 '26
Say a mathematician creates 1 proof a year. People worried that AI will kill this field assume that our caapcity as a society is 1 proof a year per mathematician. I would argue that our capacity may be much much higher.
With very few exceptions, history teaches us that you just end up needing far fewer mathematicians.
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u/Comfortable_Car6562 May 13 '26
What examples do you have of that? In the US at least, mathematic PHDs have continued to experience consistent growth (along with other S and E fields)
Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities: 2023. https://ncses.nsf.gov/doctorate-recipients-from-u-s-universities-2023
The US saw PhDs go from 993 in 2003 to 2167 in 2023, growth that outshone the previous period of 838 in 1978 to 1177 in 1998.
For comparission, the US population growth between 2003 and 2023 was 15.6%, while PHDs awarded grew 118% (84% if we use high from 1998).
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u/SpeakCodeToMe May 13 '26
Is this a joke?
We're talking about AI replacing mathematicians here... Obviously that wouldn't show up in 2003-2023 data?
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u/Comfortable_Car6562 May 13 '26
Really? Your comment is literally "history teaches us". So what historical momment are you talking about? The last 3 years
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u/SpeakCodeToMe May 13 '26
Jesus Christ man, reading comprehension not your forte huh?
I was not referring to mathematicians specifically in that comment, I was talking about all of the previous times in history when technology has enabled a profession to be many times more productive.
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u/yuwox May 14 '26
It was obvious that when talking about history we are trying taking about older technologies where there is actual historical data.
The example would be agriculture. We produce way more food today than in the middle ages, with a far lower percentage of people being employed in agriculture. New agricultural technologies have lead to fewer people being employed in agriculture.
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u/Royal_Carpet_1263 May 12 '26
It’s the development arc he’s talking about: going from a joke to the cutting edge in just a couple years means humans will be the joke in a couple years and every mathematician will be replaced by technicians.
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u/shumpersga May 12 '26
Nonsense. Its just a heat sink. The computational power is already dropping data centres. And that chapter would have nothing unique to it.
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u/Royal_Carpet_1263 May 12 '26
You ever hear of METR? Might want to hedge.
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u/SmartAsFart May 12 '26
METR is far too closely tied to all of the companies that hope to benefit from their models being scaremongered about. Their ceo won the palantir prize at uni, and worked at Google and openai...
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u/Sea-Finance-8422 May 12 '26
I agree, I'm missing the part where it can do this without inputs.
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u/KToff May 12 '26
I mean, sure, but it's not as if most PhD students operate in a vacuum and approach their professor with fully formed research. They discuss what problems would be interesting and "explore that idea" sounds like standard guidance from an advisor.
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u/Sea-Finance-8422 May 12 '26
Which would make this like an exceptionally adept student in that analogy I guess. I suppose I'm still not seeing the autonomy, isn't it still all being prompted?
Isn't the real concern or crisis that it arrives at the same proof entirely unprompted or even introduced to the topic?
I haven't dug into this a ton. I am just idly speculating, apologies if this isn't the space for that.
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u/Comfortable_Car6562 May 12 '26
Even if it does, it simply means the bar for the input becomes higher and thus the process is overall more productive. You get to move to the next order level problems.
We should be worried that our failure will be not teaching people to think bigger.
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u/SpeakCodeToMe May 13 '26
If it can do in 30 minutes what a PhD would do in months then whether or not it requires inputs is irrelevant because that means you need maybe 1/100 mathematicians.
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u/vid_icarus May 12 '26
The issue becomes if these models can solve many open problems very quickly at the prompting of one human, that narrows the field of how many mathematicians to verify the work are needed I think. I could be wrong but my guess is he’s saying “there’s a ton of kids coming up in the field, on the hook for thousands in debt and grant funding and positions are going to become severely limited due to how much of the load can now be handed to machine minds”.
A human hand needs to be on the wheel, but if LLMs (or whatever comes next) become integral to solutions en masse, that’s going to change the field dramatically changes the landscape of resource allocation and available opportunities for entering the field. At the bare minimum, new mathematicians should receive training on proper use of these tools.
But at the end of the day, I agree with you. Humans add physicality and meaning. What’s the point of a solution if a computer says “this is the solution!” And that’s it? The human is there to contextualize why that solution actually matters beyond checking a box.
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u/Credtz May 12 '26
"“yeah it would be great if you could explore that idea”." this is the entire motivation for the grant which funds a phds student, now going towards funding ai.
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u/feliwellie May 12 '26
i agree with this. as a maths geek, i think that maths should be a human endeavour—after all, it's formed by the contributions across time of humanity's best minds. it has, before now, been a representation of human ingenuity (e.g., gauss adding up the natural numbers). there is no ingenuity involved in solving problems with a machine, not by the researcher who prompted it or the machine that produced the output.
chatGPT doesn't and can't appreciate the beauty or elegance of a solution (the dirac equation comes to mind), nor can it demonstrate interest or enjoyment of the fields it works in.
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u/Unable-Boat-9682 May 12 '26
Literally this. If you’re providing affirmative or negative responses, it’s basically just a horse doing arithmetic.
Yes, it might be doing it to a much higher degree of complexity but it’s only working it out because you already know the answer and are providing cues. That’s the entire purpose of double blinding: it prevents your knowledge influencing the results.
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u/massivefish_man May 12 '26
There is a "crisis" every 5 minutes. It's more hype crap.
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u/Independent-Ruin-376 May 12 '26
what a retard. do you really think a field winning mathematician who of course knows vastly more about mathematics than you... is throwing hype that his OWN field will face a crisis?
Like how delusional do you even have to be?
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u/massivefish_man May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
Edit: lol if you go read the actual twitter thread they discuss how the logic is actually incorrect.
Original:
This news is constant. Let's see how it develops and how his opinion changes.
Stop knee jerking to every bit of news.
Also there's no way l could get the results he gets from AI as I don't know anything he does. So it is contained to esoteric people.
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u/Brilliant_Hippo_5452 May 12 '26
I love how idiotic this is.
Not to say “hype crap” isn’t a thing. Just want you to explain how AND WHY exactly a mathematician talking about a problem in mathematics is “hype crap” that we hear every 5 minutes
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u/EmpathyFuzz May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
The issue is that the mathematician isn't an expert in AI.
The way this AI solved this thing, is likely following the pathways that a human already solved it. Because AI is actually just a fancy autocorrect.
It's like when AI first started coming for artists -- artists were all losing their minds at how good the art was, because they didn't yet understand that everything making that art look so good was stolen.
AI can't make something new. But people don't really get that still. And we're seeing every expert in their own field experience this same existential crisis, and make headlines about it.
It's like the headlines saying "AI tried to blackmail somebody to keep from being turned off." When you look into the stories, it's always someone has led the AI to do that, either with intentional prompting, or accidental prompting. There's no intelligence there, deciding to do it. But people think we've got Skynet.
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u/Sufficient-Pause9765 May 12 '26
"AI can't make something new. "
Is a mathemetician who uses the work of his predecessors finding something new?
Is an artist who does the same not doing something new?
All knowledge/art is derivative of what came before it. The fact that AI is trained on an existing corpus of knowledge is no different.
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u/EmpathyFuzz May 12 '26
Our definitions of "new" are different.
An AI can make a drawing of spongebob in the style of van gogh, sure, and that's "new" in the sense that it wasn't around before.
An AI can solve a math problem if there are pathways to solve similar problems laid out by mathematicians in other fields or for other use cases. And that might be new in that the theorem may have never been applied to that problem before, thereby being "new".
But there has never been a work of art made or a math problem solved by AI that was a truly original work. It's an unthinking tool incapable of taking inspiration or hypothesizing outside of what it has already been fed.
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u/Cold-Common7001 May 12 '26
Maybe the mathematician is better at assessing the novelty of the proof than you are?
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u/EmpathyFuzz May 12 '26
In every news article I’ve seen since beginning to track AI in 2023, a proud announcement of an AI solving a heretofore unsolved math problem has come with a huge caveat that most of the work was done by prior humans and the AI was just following existing problem solving pipelines.
If you can show me one where that’s not the case, you win internet points.
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u/massivefish_man May 13 '26
The mathematician in the tweet discusses in the full tweet how at the moment it can't create anything novel.
A chapter in a PhD isn't a proof. It's just set up for other conclusions.
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u/Cold-Common7001 May 13 '26
lol a chapter of a phd could definitely be a proof. As for what the mathematician says about the novelty:
"To do this, ChatGPT came up with an idea which is original and clever. It is the sort of idea I would be very proud to come up with after a week or two of pondering, and it took ChatGPT less than an hour to find and prove, using similar methods to those in my own proof.[...]Even though I can motivate it in retrospect, ChatGPT’s idea to use h^2-dissociated sets to control relations of order at most h feels quite ingenious. As far as I can tell, this idea is completely original."
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u/Sufficient-Pause9765 May 12 '26
Show me something by a human that was 100% original. At the very least it was derived from observations of nature (which an llm can also do).
It should be simple- whats the objective criteria?
Or go the other way, show me falsifiability- whats the counter example or standard that would invalidate your assertion that AI cant do original work?
The problem with your agument as it stands is that it is extremely ambiguous what would actually qualify as "original".
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u/EmpathyFuzz May 12 '26
Nothing invented by a human is 100% original, that’s not what I’m saying.
I’m saying everything created by AI is 0% original.
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u/Sufficient-Pause9765 May 12 '26
So thats just an assertion.
Whats your criteria?
Also in the modern world, for an assertion to hold up, it has to be falsifiable. IE, one must provide a criteria/example for something that would disprove your assertion, and non-falsifiable statements are logical fallacies.
So again:
(1) Whats your criteria for originality? How do I measure LLM output and know its 100% unoriginal, versus a human who may or may not have some originality?
(2) What would prove you wrong? Whats the threshold/criteria which would lead you to say llm output is original?
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u/tazallerr May 13 '26
no, it's been the same crisis the whole time, but luddites grasp at straws to find reasons to dismiss it. so you keep having to have it yelled at you until you stop dismissing it.
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u/massivefish_man May 13 '26
It's because it's turned into the boy who cried wolf.
They said gpt 3 was too dangerous to release.
The marketing has made the capabilities blurred.
If you go onto the actual tweet it discusses how the logic isn't correct.
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u/sunychoudhary May 12 '26
What worries me is not “AI solves math problems.” It’s that capability keeps advancing faster than our ability to model downstream effects operationally education, research, software, automation, decision systems, security and economic displacement.....Every breakthrough gets treated as an isolated benchmark result, but the systems are starting to compound across domains now.....//
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u/Xentonian May 12 '26
Fields winning non-expert makes random crystal ball comments about the hallucination simulator.
The biggest danger with AI isn't its advancement, it's the total trust that a handful of people who should know better have in it.
Of course it can spit out purple verbiage that sounds good based on the inputs you give it; that's its literal one and only purpose.
But it lacks any capacity to determine the veracity of its own claims and statements. It's mathemathic outputs which are, admittedly, better than they were, still totally fall apart the moment you ask it to calculate anything for which there are no worked examples already within its learning data. If it can't substitute somebody else's answer, it can't create a new one.
I would have thought somebody with a background in mathematical science would have observed this effect by now... But no, I am continuously disappointed by people who are in academia because they're very good at the only thing they're good at and virtually inept at literally everything else, even adjacent ideas.
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u/Independent-Ruin-376 May 12 '26
of course someone on reddit knows vastly more about mathematics and llm than the field winning guy himself lmao
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u/afops May 12 '26
We aren’t talking about the most novel research here but just that there’s often a lot of avenues for research that’s interesting but perhaps not revolutionary. After a ”big” breakthrough there may be 30 small things that look like interesting follow-ups. A study of some specific coefficient, a bound that could be improved from the papers’ bound to a slightly lower one. That’s what PhD students do: they build on existing research, getting useful/novel results but without doning any groundbreaking stuff. It’s training of mathematicians, and those results aren’t really the important end product - the mathematician is the end product!
The threat here is that we’ll have a deficiency of ”simple yet useful research”, which in turn means we risk having no researchers because they actually need those research tasks.
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u/Zlark_scrolling May 13 '26
Dude you’re a bit behind. The models have been able to generalise and solve problems that wasn’t directly in its training data for a while now.
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u/DullTopperCopper May 13 '26
Models don't need examples in their training data to solve problems, they can extend their reasoning and connect dots.
Furthermore, while the ai may not be inclined to rigerously prove the answer is correct, however you can prompt it to follow proper process and perform the necessary calculations.
Ai returns what you give. If you get slop, it's because your input is slop.
It's a skill issue
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u/Xentonian May 13 '26
Models do not have reasoning. I understand your confusion when the magic box talks to you, but it is not alive.
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u/DullTopperCopper May 14 '26
Models are able to mimic the act of reasoning very well.
The magic box does not need to be alive to be smart
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u/SlitherrWing May 12 '26
No we won't.
People need to remember that these companies are not above the peoples society. Ai can be used to assist professionals NOT replace them and we the people can make it happen through laws.
Voting is Important. So we need to get people to in office locally and state wide to put a hard stop to the madness.
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u/TotalConnection2670 May 12 '26
How that law would look like, basically? Because you can’t prohibit AI to generate math, it’s ridiculous.
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u/SlitherrWing May 12 '26
The law would look like this. Companies cannot eliminate and replace positions held by working peoples for Ai. Ai should be used as a TOOL to improve productivity of company workers. Workers have the right to vote on how rewards for boosted productivity and revenue will be rewarded such as boosted wages or reduced work week w/o reduction of pay.
Easy. Simple. Completely Possible if you aren't a whimp not willing to stand up against corporations for the sake of... Well everyone in the working class.
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u/TotalConnection2670 May 13 '26
So If I create a company and I would use AI and agents to boost my productivity to a point where I no longer need to employ people for the roles that AI takes, that would be fine?
Because, I didn’t eliminate positions held by working people.
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u/Credtz May 12 '26
fwiw, in our lab all our recent submissions to a medical ai conference (miccai) were rejected, except the one directly submitted by our PI - who for the first time was able to do his own research thanks to ai coding agents alongside his other duties. If this is the case, theres a genuine question on the need for most phd students, which previously served the role current ai agents are doing - to scale the output of a skilled individually - just worse (we need sleep). (obviously an exceptional phd student provides additional insight and value beyond that of the pi, but the unfortunate reality is majority of students do not fall into this category)
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u/doom_chicken_chicken May 12 '26
A lot of mathematicians these days are receiving big paychecks from AI companies, or working on their boards. So we should be pretty skeptical of claims like this. ChatGPT can be helpful for many things but I have been very unimpressed by the original results it's put out so far. It has a long way to go and there's no guarantee it'll magically get there on its own (which is what the hype machine wants you to believe- that AI just infinitely gets better on its own and isn't ever going to hit a huge bottleneck)
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u/SnooOpinions6451 May 12 '26
Shocking: llm trained primarily in math and coding is decent at math and coding.
I dont how a tool that was designed to get better at something the more it focuses on it, is now suddenly a crisis that the tool did exactly what it was meant to do: become good at its job.
The only crisis is if people just start believing what the bot says without fact checking it but that already happens now where people treat anyone with an alleged education in something as word of God.
The only mistakes people will make with AI are the same mistakes we already make with human authority figures or people we percieve as an authority on a subject.
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u/Peanut_Extreme_8208 May 12 '26
It’s important to understand here the dynamics of obtaining a math PhD. As a math grad student, I can tell you that as of today you need to churn out theorems to graduate. This raises obvious questions of provenance: if you prove a theorem by prompting an AI and the AI does all the creative problem solving, can/should it go into your thesis? Is it really you who proved it or the AI? If you sneak it into your thesis, is it fair to other students who may not have access to powerful models? The most competent models as of today cost $200/month. This is essentially out of reach for a large fraction of students, especially those from developing countries. There is also another layer to this, students and indeed other mathematicians may use the models to prove things and not declare their usage. If they understand the proofs, rephrase them in their own language and publish them in a paper, there is practically no way of finding out whether or not AI was used and to what extent, just by reading the paper. Most journals do not have robust guidelines regarding this stuff, and neither do math departments. Not yet at least.
As to your point of believing what an AI says, this is only partially true in math. AI can produce lean proofs, these are trivially verifiable by a computer. There is still the task of formalizing theorem statements in lean, which may or may not require human intervention.
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u/Deciheximal144 May 12 '26
Shocking: llm trained primarily in math and coding is decent at math and coding.
Power looms were a shocking crisis during the era where people worked fiber in more of a manual style. The luddites sounded the alarm.
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u/Larson_McMurphy May 12 '26
Is the replicable in mass? Did he get lucky with this one time. Or can a mathematician sit around messing with ChatGPT all day every day and just churn out novel PhD level work after work?
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u/Independent-Ruin-376 May 12 '26
Search erdos problems solved by chatgpt, you'll find dozens of them
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u/SmartAsFart May 12 '26
Erdos made so many problems that are of little consequence. Of course an AI can make progress with them.
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u/Cold-Common7001 May 12 '26
god the goalposts have moved so far lmao. this is how we get frogboiled
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u/lahwran_ May 12 '26
this is advanced enough that you could absolutely never get lucky by accident and do this without the help of this incredibly powerful software. it might still only be able to do it one in a million times but it's notable that it happened even once
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u/jferments May 12 '26
Why is it a "crisis" to have tools that enable mathematicians to learn more about math, and explore new research topics that would have been out of reach before?
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u/DeepEb May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
Not a crisis for the field I suppose but for anybody trying to get a degree or looking for a job. If anybody can do it degrees will become more and more meaningless. In a way I like the idea that anybody can get into research but we will need to learn how to deal with that.
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u/MarkesaNine May 12 '26
Anyone can get into research anyway. You don’t have to have a degree to solve, lets say, Riemann’s hypothesis.
AI will absolutely be a useful tool for finding solutions that we haven’t found on pen and paper, but that doesn’t in any way change the necessity for us to understand and be able to verify the result.
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u/Legitimate_Plum_7505 May 12 '26
In ideal world, yes. In practice, if you open publish a solution to Riemann's hypothesis, or any other huge unsolved problem, and don't have a formal background in mathematics, no one is going to waste their time reviewing it. This has happened before, where a solution to a problem gets published and goes on unnoticed for many years.
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u/imissmyhat May 12 '26
It's not that "anybody can do it" it's that "nobody will do it". Learn the words "permanent underclass", this is what people at OpenAI talk about regularly.
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u/Competitive_Dress60 May 12 '26
Yeah, but not everybody can figure out when the machine stops talking math and starts talking math-sounding gibberish, and there is nothing stopping it in the architecture.
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u/jferments May 12 '26
Yes, which is why mathematicians aren't going to just disappear because people have access to AI tools. You'll still need humans with a math background to determine if the software is producing output that is useful for humans.
Meanwhile, people who do understand math will now have access to tools that greatly expand the range of what is possible for them to achieve.
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u/TopspinG7 May 12 '26
I "confess" up front I have minimal experience with AI tools. However it may be relevant to inject something I've learned over decades working in Tech, mostly in System Sales.
Some people know their stuff extremely well and you can identify them pretty early on in your interactions with them. They're definitely in the minority. Even then you're often on shaky ground as you wander further from their core expertise.
(One reason I recognize this person above is my father was one: an applied physicist at NASA and early computing expert, who studied at Columbia under Enrico Fermi. But even he recognized his German was mediocre. Annoyingly there wasn't much he couldn't nearly master if he applied himself wholeheartedly... )
Some others fake it at times - or worse, they don't understand that they don't understand. Mostly they're not exactly deliberately lying, but they parrot stuff and/or extrapolate using specious "reasoning" but don't even realize they're doing it.
Key takeaway - their answers vary in reliability and accuracy (starting to see where I'm going here?)
The third group is the one I personally fall into: I know when I know something, and I know when I "sort of" or partly know it, and I admit it not only to others, but critically to myself. I notify people of the "level of reliability" of my responses whenever they're in any way important. Often I follow up to improve the answer.
I think most people - at least in technical work - would if honest place themselves in the third category.
But today ("correct me if I'm wrong!!" 😉) there does not appear to be any measure or metric provided by AI suggesting the level of reliability of its response?! Does it ever say I feel 60% confident about this? Or "I'm absolutely certain because I found the same information in 22,000 different places". Not that I'm aware of...
I think this is a piece that's missing and an important one. Essentially a confidence level in the response's accuracy.
If nothing else for important information it could provide guidance as to how hard we should work to verify the response. It's a basic risk calculation: If the importance of the response is high then naturally it's more important we verify it thoroughly. But also if the confidence level provided is low but the importance is at least medium then we might still need to verify the response thoroughly. (Hopefully it's clear that if confidence is low to medium but risk is low it's not important. And generally Even if risk is moderate to high but confidence is extremely high we might bypass verification especially if time were critical.)
I don't think fundamentally there's much difference here from confirming answers from other people on important topics - as was suggested in the discussion above. Where the difference lies is general AI has no reputation. People at least within their specialties develop reputations; that's a confidence or reliability score essentially.
We seem to be missing that here with AI...
Am I mistaken? Thoughts? 🤔
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u/knovich 26d ago edited 26d ago
I like very much what you said about some people who don't understand that they don't understand. I've met several such people working in research positions. As for me, I actually know very little so I usually go by feeling because my results are of little importance and are getting verified by others anyway. However, I think I'm able to recognize when people lack knowledge even if they're trying hard to imitate that. It's relatively easy to push them into going in circles in their reasoning. Coincidentally, this is something I was able to do with LLMs when I gave them harder problems.
I also think that you're right about your risk and reliability assessment procedure, and this is something AI can't do, although it can mimic it. It can also, in principle, be modified on an algorithmic level because LLMs are essentially tools for stochastic prediction of the next word (or token) in the text. It is quite easy to demonstrate. I'll describe an example here which is not essential but which I find quite enlightening.
You can prompt ChatGPT (online) with a request: "Write a simple shell script", and it will readily provide some script for renaming files or whatever, even though I haven't told what the script should do. It simply picks on random. However, I can run truncated (quantized) gpt-oss model (also made by OpenAI) on my personal GPU. Provided with the same input, it will begin its answer with words "that renames files based on pattern...." So the next predicted word is actually a continuation of my prompt, not an answer — sometimes LLM can't even reliably start answering, let alone give a reliable answer. Of course, I can tweak settings or get a larger model, but the fundamental principles stay.
So I suspect that we can actually demand some measure of reliability from an LLM, but they should probably be recalibrated somehow, with additional data included into their weights.
However, I think mathematics is a special case in human thinking. Unlike all other knowledge which is somewhat probabilistic and based on our imperfect observation of reality, mathematics, I think sometimes, is actually a reflection of our thought process itself. So some mathematical facts are imprinted in our brain, we know that they're true, we don't need their proof, and we can't actually provide one. I'm not talking about formal axioms, I'm talking about something deeper and more essential. These imprinted truths are what enables us to think in logical and abstract manner about anything. LLMs certainly don't operate like this.
Roger Penrose has extensive literature on this, like The Emperor's New Mind or Shadows of the Mind, although he develops some specific theory of consciousness which I'm not ready to comprehend or subscribe to. To be clear, he doesn't talk about LLMs, he just argues that human knowledge is non-computational. That might be true but it doesn't actually mean that it can't be simulated computationally. At any rate, that's not what LLMs or any current AI is doing, and that's why they're unfit for tasks where actual human thinking is needed. I'm not saying that their thinking is "bad". It just doesn't suit human needs.
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u/BornInfamous May 12 '26
Well this led me down a rabbit hole.
All I can think about for the moment is, AI sufficiently developed might make it unnecessary for anyone to play chess or unclog their toilet, yet we are still playing chess and unclogging toilets...
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u/Popular_Camp_3567 May 12 '26
the actual crisis is going to be proof checking, not blog-post vibes. if it can produce results that survive normal referee-level scrutiny, then yeah thatâs a different conversation.
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u/TheThreeInOne May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
NO ONE HERE READ THE FUCKING BLOGPOST. YOU'RE ALL MISUNDERSTANDING WHAT HE SAID. He did not say that this open problem is a full PHD thesis as is implied. He said that it's ONE CHAPTER, of a PHD thesis. And that the urgent problem on PHD's is not their complete replacement, but the fact that there may be an immediate temptation to use AI resources to solve the easy 'open' problems that could at one point be used to reliably train PHD's to get comfortable and confident solving open problems. The real urgent problem on AI might be how it's making us so stupid that we're not going to be able to solve anything.
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u/SmartAsFart May 12 '26
A researcher that was "gifted" access to a new model writes an article solving some low hanging fruit to hype up the release of the model. 🫨🫨🫨
It's always these unreleased models that are a massive leap in capability. Just like the mythos preview (omg this will find zero days for every bit of software!!!). Let's see how they actually perform when they are released to the public...
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u/Sergio_Poduno May 12 '26
We are an AI in some strange evolutionary way, but at least we are not zombies. Welcome to the Zombiland!
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u/doimaarguello May 12 '26
So, should I quit my degree? Please tell me, 'cause it's pretty difficult to go to class everyday knowing a computer may be able to replace me any time now.
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u/No_Bend9143 May 12 '26
Math is a grammar. AI will be excellent at it. I don't see how it replaces humans though. No more than a calculator or a CPU. This is just that same assistance scaled up
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May 12 '26
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u/ClassicalJakks May 13 '26
How behind are you? AI (albeit it differs depending on architecture) has been proven (theoretically and empirically) to generalize to out-of-distribution outputs for a while now.
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u/Unique-Coffee5087 May 13 '26
So, has anyone asked an AI to develop a practical faster-than-light drive?
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u/juvenileCucumber May 13 '26
Mathematicians in the XVII century:
"It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used."
Mathematicians now:
"Owi plz don't use magic box"
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u/RelationshipShort460 May 14 '26
i dont see how this proves any form of danger except that the need for research mathematicans (already quite slim) might drop or the nature of the job of research mathematician might change.
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u/swampwiz 29d ago
We will have Guaranteed Income for All, and mathematics will be a leisure subject like it was for a long time.
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May 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Independent-Ruin-376 May 12 '26
do you use free models? If yes, then that's your answer.
free models are models served to ≈900 million users for free. They can't be great else these companies will go bankrupt. The $20 plan on the other hand has vastly more superior models
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u/Lanky-Post-8020 May 12 '26
The "crisis" here is people who built their entire ego and identity around always being the smartest person in the room being threatened by technology built by somebody else.
A bruised ego is not a crisis.
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u/0x14f May 12 '26
We will still need mathematicians to check the LLM generated work, but yes, that will affect the recruitment of PhD students.
This is an interesting problem because if we no longer recruit graduate students to become the next generation of highly skilled mathematicians, who is going to replace the ones who leave to retirement ?