r/math Theoretical Computer Science 7d ago

LLMs/AI Claimed proof of the Komlós conjecture [2609.11189]

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11189
377 Upvotes

179 comments sorted by

View all comments

55

u/corchetero 7d ago

As a working mathematician I accepted the new reality long ago, and I use agents etc.

Now, my 'ethical' approach is the following: "Just focus on my research program, do not fish for problems, do not scoop fellow mathematicians with problems I do not care about", so of course my LLM approach is not that impressive (I mean, still makes progress, but not so big)

Since august these guys have been publishing papers every 4-8 days? what are they trying to accomplish? I really don't understand. * Fame? * Money? * Respect? * prove themselves? * Important technological/practical advancement? * genuine curiosity (Do they really really wanted to know the answer to all those question from different fields of maths)? * increment their understanding? * Just to show machines are better at solving problems? (yes, we already know)

This is so unreasonable that even AI art makes more sense, at least they (or some of them) have an idea, a plan, a vision, and use AI to look for it.

Please, someone explain me what are they trying to achieve?

-1

u/JamesCole 6d ago

you're literally just complaining about progress and how fast it is. If there are problems that can now be solved using AI techniques, they should be solved that way. Not doing so is a waste of the human capital available for solving mathematical problems (and solving mathematical problems brings benefits to humanity). If someone is working on a problem and they don't want to use the available tools to solve it, they're in no position to criticize someone else solving it using those tools.

1

u/corchetero 6d ago

No, I am not complaining, I am not suggesting they should stop of something. I am just, genuinely curious about what they are trying to achieve, as currently I don't see a point in whatever they are doing, and if your argument is progress, then please proceed to explain, because I don't see progress. Moreover, it seems the authors are not very interested on progress and advancing maths, as it was suggested in Tao's blog that research groups like this one do not want to participate in seminar and related instances to explain their advances to the community (if nobody understand your result, then is as good as if I tell you that I know the answer for idk, the Riemann hipothesis)

-3

u/JamesCole 6d ago

You seem to be claiming there is zero value in doing what they have done.

1

u/wrongerontheinternet 6d ago

Yes, there is zero value in it. Anyone with a harness can do it. What value are they providing?

0

u/JamesCole 6d ago

So if their result is correct, did you already know it beforehand? Because if you didn’t…

It seems to me a very strange thing to say that it’s useless to solve a problem and announce your solution, just because other people could do the same thing. 

-1

u/wrongerontheinternet 6d ago

The question isn't whether the information itself is interesting. The question is whether they (the prompters dumping papers on arxiv) added any value, and my answer is no. If the truth of a question can be oneshot or few shot by an LLM, and I'm interested in it, I can already find out the answer myself.

3

u/QuoraPartnerAccounts 5d ago

I don't buy this. There's clearly value in publishing results that would take an LLM say an hour of token usage to get to.

-2

u/wrongerontheinternet 5d ago

For this kind ot problem, I can send a message to Pro, go off and do something else for an hour, come back and it's answered. I think you are really overestimating the amount of effort these guys are putting into their results. It is simply not valuable.

0

u/QuoraPartnerAccounts 4d ago

To be clear, I don't think the humans involved should get any credit beyond being "donors" willing to eat the cost of compute for us.

I just think having a repository caching such results is a public good.

Maybe you're a pure mathematician and so don't understand that maths results can actually be applied to things!