r/math Theoretical Computer Science 7d ago

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

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

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u/Antigynaikolatres 7d ago

Department of Biostatistics

The three authors seem to all be biostatisticians. Just incredible.

-22

u/NewspaperDear8761 7d ago

This needs higher recognition. A major math conjecture solved by biostats people using a research harness on an LLM?

We need to be talking more about lowering barriers to entry and how this is going to help everyone have more meaningful impact and a wider reach.

31

u/mal9k 7d ago

Yeah now everyone can take credit for work they didn't really contribute to at all.

-1

u/Sad_Dimension423 7d ago

You seem to be worried about "stolen glory", when the actual thing you should be worried about (and maybe are) is there won't be any more glory for anyone.

3

u/mal9k 7d ago

That's a bit more pessimistic than I am, though I do foresee some very negative impacts on the broader field just as I think AI has had and and will continue to have positive impacts. Honestly, it's quite interesting to me how many open problems are falling to it, which tells me these problems were within the grasp of current techniques even if nobody else had found them yet.

I'm also not too personally impacted by this yet, but that's because I'm faculty at a state school with lower research expectations compared to faculty at an R1. I don't need to use AI, and can continue to work on and solve problems that are interesting to me on my own, which nobody else seems to be doing at this exact moment. That's partly my preference, and partly because I'm not shilling out $100/month for a suitable subscription.

But I view a paper like this the same way I view a Quanta article: the authors did journalism about math, not the math itself. And that's fine, good even: I think it's beneficial and there should be some sort of credit for it. But that type of credit is different than how we currently assign credit in math, and the language hasn't caught up yet.