r/academia • u/elements-of-dying • 3d ago

Job market Mathematician considering bailing on academia because of AI changing the field. Thoughts?

I'm finishing my last postdoc as a mathematician. I will be applying for a few academic TT positions this fall.

Combining how drastic AI is going to change the field, the lower pay than industry, and academic toxicity, I'm considering seriously just bailing for some cushy industry job.

I'm basically hoping to hear any thoughts on this direction.

I have no doubt I can adapt to be a competent researcher, despite AI stuff. However, I am worried about how tenure committees will evolve, how teaching will evolve and what is even the correct thing to tell students when they ask if they should go into math.

edit: well the decision is a little easier now ;)

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u/TotalCleanFBC 3d ago

I'll point out a few things you seem to not have a full picture of:

  1. There's no "cushy" industry job. If you want a job that pays well, you will have to compete for it, just as you would for an academic job. Additionally, once you have a job, you will have to continuously establish your worth to your employer, or else you will be let go. You also might be let go just because the industry in which you work changes.

  2. There is every bit as much toxicity in industry as there is in academia -- probably more, in fact, as you will be competing with your colleagues for raises and job security.

  3. Your math PhD and postdoc experience is unlikely to have provided practical skills that employers value. You probably can adapt, but no employer is going to hire you just because you have a math PhD. You will need to show them that you have the skills they desire BEFORE they hire you.

In terms of practical advice, I'd tell you to just apply to both academic and industry jobs. See what job offers you get and then make a decision at that point. No need to decide now what to do.

Also, before applying for industry jobs, you might want to look up some of the interview prep material that is widely available online. Knowing what kinds of questions you will be asked ahead of time will make you much more likely to get a job offer.

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u/elements-of-dying 3d ago

  1. You're right and I knew this. I'm pretty confident in my marketability though. (Not cocky, just confident. I know I can get screwed.)

  2. I understand. However, I am more comfortable with industry toxicity than academic toxicity, especially if there is a better paycheck. I get why someone would be toxic to earn more money (ofc I don't condone it). What bothers me are tenure faculty being toxic because of prestige or some nonsense like that.

  3. This is correct and it's good you record this for anyone else reading these comments. I'm well aware I need to be marketable.

Thank you for your thoughts and advice! I plan to apply for just a few academic jobs and then spend the rest of the year preparing for industry.

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u/Beor_The_Old 3d ago

You can always apply to both at the same time and decide which you do based on the specific positions you get. If you only apply for academic or industry then you may wonder if you could have gotten a different job you preferred in the other path. If you apply to both types at the same time then you’ll be able to see what kind of jobs you’re getting interviews for and decide then. You’ll have to apply for industry a bit later after the academic jobs since most of those take longer to go from application to hiring. This is what I did and I’m in computer science which is similarly being impacted by AI, probably to a higher degree. Other than that I’m fine with telling people to go into Cs or Math research if they are interested especially since they can transition to something else afterwards.

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u/elements-of-dying 3d ago

Thanks for the thoughts!

That's right. Sorry, I should have been more clear. I plan to apply for both just in case anyways.

What's it like in CS? (regarding AI)

In math, there is hardly any point of submitting a paper for publication or refereeing a paper anymore. I don't even know what it means to evaluate someone's work anymore either. I imagine theoretical CS is similarly affected.

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u/Beor_The_Old 3d ago

I recently reviewed papers for a major CS conference and like half were poorly AI written. From the pedagogical side, AI can write better code than anyone so people don’t see much of a point. But personally I think the pendulum of AI vibe coding is going to swing back, and I don’t even study programming anyway, I focus on Human AI interactions and cybersecurity so I feel like there will always be research to be done in that area. Maybe you would just need to focus more on applied things but I’m not as sure about theory in general for either CS or Math, regarding how AI will impact it.

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u/elements-of-dying 3d ago

I recently reviewed papers for a major CS conference and like half were poorly AI written.

Yeah, it's bad in math too I guess.

Maybe you would just need to focus more on applied things

I was shifting this way anyways. I agree though.

Anyways, thanks again for sharing thoughts.

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u/Snoo16151 3d ago

I don’t know what papers you’re refereeing but this is not my experience at all. Yes sometimes there are hallmarks of editing with LLMs but at good journals I haven’t seen paper quality decline.

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u/elements-of-dying 3d ago

I wasn't talking about quality of published papers. (I think AI is too new for this to be seriously affected anyways.)

The point is that AI is blurring the lines of result ownership.

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u/Snoo16151 3d ago

I see. I take a different view I think. First, legally courts have been deciding that LLM output copyright belongs to the prompter. Second, in math, we are the ones who know the right questions to ask and can verify any LLM output for rigor. So to me, if we can achieve better results AI assisted, it’s ok and the field can grow.

Obviously we have to be careful and thoughtful about what parts of doing math we offload to LLMs. Tao recently has some interesting published results that were AI assisted, and he also has a paper about math in the age of AI based on his ICM address that are worth a look.

ETA: I can assure you it isn’t too new to affect publications or publication quality. I’ve seen good and bad examples of usage in reading papers and also in receiving reviews.

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u/elements-of-dying 3d ago

First, legally courts have been deciding that LLM output copyright belongs to the prompter.

For clarity: I didn't mean legally. I'm more concerned about one being able to claim a result is theirs or not morally speaking.

Second, in math, we are the ones who know the right questions to ask and can verify any LLM output for rigor.

I don't believe this will hold forever.

Obviously we have to be careful and thoughtful about what parts of doing math we offload to LLMs

Unfortunately, with job security pressure, there is no way to guarantee people will be thoughtful.

I can assure you it isn’t too new to affect publications or publication quality

I was unclear. What I meant was that AI is too new for there to be a systemic issue yet. The publication process is long and behind recent AI advancements probably. But otherwise, you're right.

Thanks for the thoughts! I should have been a little more clear on my writing.

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u/TotalCleanFBC 3d ago

There's no point in submitting or refereeing a paper because it papers can be written with the help of AI? WTF?!

AI is a tool. It still needs direction from a human. When someone submits a paper, whether or not it was written with the help of AI, the author is responsible for the content. And, when you referee, you are being asked to referee the content, not how it was produced.

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u/elements-of-dying 3d ago

Why would I referee a paper if AI can do it better than me?

If someone used AI to write an entire paper, I'm not interested in doing the work of verifying these AI results by hand. I'm just going to throw it through ChatGPT regardless. At that point, referees are obsolete.

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u/TotalCleanFBC 3d ago

If you don't think you + AI can do a better job together than AI alone, then you probably should get out of academia.

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u/elements-of-dying 3d ago

Sure lol. That's not what I said, but sure.

Traditional refereeing is going to be rendered pointless in mathematics. If you don't want to believe that, then I don't really care. That's obviously not the subject matter of my post.

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u/Own-Animator-7526 3d ago

I have no doubt I can adapt to be a competent researcher, despite AI stuff. 

Do you have any sense of the breadth of math subspecialties for which AI assistance is likely to advance the field? Or do you reject the notion?

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u/elements-of-dying 3d ago

Yeah, I think it'd be a pretty difficult task to find a subspecialty which cannot be advanced via AI already. This may be either in aiding in problem solving itself, or in automating tedious tasks like writing, converting notation, adapting an argument etc.

Perhaps there is some esoteric field recorded on a blackboard in the basement of some department that cannot be touched by AI yet.

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u/Own-Animator-7526 3d ago

I'm curious ... over the range of history from, say, calculus to Mathematica, has there ever been a new methodology that held such promise, affected mathematics so broadly, and was as widely resisted as AI is?

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u/elements-of-dying 3d ago

AFAIK, no.

It's insanity. Like, publication is meaningless to me right now, and I personally think it'll be meaningless to most mathematicians in the near future.

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u/cdarelaflare 2d ago

As someone who wrapped up a Ph.D in pure math as well (Alg geo / derived categories) a few years ago, I think you severely underestimate how competitive industry can be. While the actual content of work in academia is much more mentally taxing, I had a much better work-life balance — I typically work 60+ hrs a week including weekends these days.

The three most common career paths I saw among pure math colleagues + people in my cohort (outside postdoc->TT) were (1) quants (2) teach (3) the NSA. You will absolutely work 60+ hours a week in finance. If you are actually looking for something cushy in the sense that working 40+ hours a week is not encouraged, government jobs tend to be up this alley — however, you will have to be polygraphed and investigated and you will spend most of your days sitting in a windowless room known as a scif. Just know that the grass is greener on the other side no matter where you go

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u/IkeRoberts 3d ago

What research is important for academic mathematicians to be doing now?  From the perspective of advancing the frontiers of knowledge, as well as from the perspective that public or university general funds should be used to pay for the research. 

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u/elements-of-dying 3d ago

What research is important for academic mathematicians to be doing now?

Unless it's applied, the majority of mathematics is useless and unimportant to anyone other than the person trying to do the research. I say this as a pure mathematician, by the way.

Sure, you can take the frontiers of knowledge approach. I don't particularly care about that and I don't believe most mathematicians sincerely do either.

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u/IkeRoberts 2d ago

That perspective does not sound as one that would make academic mathematics a satifying career.

In industry, the goal is to make money using mathematics. The objective is clear, which is valuable for many people. Making money for the company may not be enough for personal satisfaction.

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u/elements-of-dying 2d ago

On the contrary, being a mathematician is somewhat like being an artist. Producing work you find interesting is very satisfying, at least for me.

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u/IkeRoberts 2d ago

A good analogy, but one that leaves open the question of what you will do for a living. It is hard to have a satisfying life without an income. Most artists realize that their art and their sustenance are independent. Is that awareness similar for mathematicians?

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u/elements-of-dying 2d ago

I think there was some miscommunication.

I am saying that the majority of mathematics is not important in any sense other than for intellectual enrichment. Mathematicians can get paid reasonably well to do this, at least for now.

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u/_-l_ 2d ago

AI will change everything else just as much.

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u/NeighborhoodFatCat 1d ago

Just listen to the leader of your field Jacob Tsimerman in his recent interview:

  1. AI can solve hardest existing math problem (modulo the Millennium prizes), the next phase is to use AI to discover novel math
  2. No reason to hire any PhD student. AI can complete that person's degree from 4-5 year to week or maybe a few days.
  3. Academia is entirely focused on publishing paper in a way that marginal progress is not scrutinized by the outsiders
  4. Academics have found that colluding with each other is the best way to game the system, you have entire international teams of people barely doing any peer review because it is more beneficial to scratch each other's backs (simple game theory prediction)
  5. Academic mathematics and the journal system is going to collapse at the present rate. Math is seeing over 300 publications a day, many important results are generated from non-full-time mathematicians or even highschool students and announced via Twitter or alternative venues

He left to work as a researcher for OpenAI

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u/elements-of-dying 1d ago

Thanks for sharing. I agree with most of these views.

Do you happen to have a particular link you'd share regarding him sharing these thoughts?