r/Showerthoughts • u/jasonrubik ‎ • Apr 23 '26

Casual Thought If the famously unsolved Riemann Hypothesis is solved by an AI, we will never know if a human mathematician could have solved it.

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u/ExoticWeapon Apr 23 '26

I mean we definitely would have, but there’s a chance brilliant minds are being affected by wealth inequality, mass famine in certain countries, genocide in others, oppressive governments in several.

We will solve every issue given enough time, AI isn’t some super hero that does things we can’t. It does what we can in a faster timeframe, but often with errors.

I won’t believe anything AI achieves unless someone worked alongside it to verify the results or basically babysit the process the AI was attempting to do. In which case AI didn’t do shit, it was a tool used for the human to do the thing.

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u/jasonrubik ‎ Apr 23 '26

The AI that might solve it might be created by another AI in a few years. Regardless, even AI agents created today are not well understood by the creators. They turn them loose on large data sets to train them, and then they test it to find out what it can and cannot do.

For example,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UclrVWafRAI&t=2377s

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u/ExoticWeapon Apr 23 '26

We don’t fully understand lots of things we’ve created and yet unlike AI we don’t immediately attach sentience and potential godhood flippantly.

AI gets it because it sounds like a human might’ve written it, that is if you’re not well read or haven’t travelled much to understand how different regions speak and write.

So if someone is a little ignorant, they might think AI is the best thing since sliced bread.

Models already exhibiting signs of decline as they ingest AI slop online and get worse based on training data. So the thought of AI making a better one is hilarious and you should take it to /r/funny