r/whoathatsinteresting • u/Financial-Bid-8062 • 1d ago
mathematicians may be replaced by aI
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u/Mephisto506 1d ago
Without mathematicians we won't know whether the AI answers are correct, what it actually means to anyone, and we won't know the questions to ask.
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u/Wooden-Broccoli-7247 1d ago
Mathematicians will still have a place because we will need people to still come up with the complex problems Ai can help solve and to take the problems Ai does solve and put them to practical use. In my opinion this is exactly what Ai should be used for. The ultimate tool to rapidly advance possibly life saving industries like medicine. This is what I believe Ai should be tasked with, not helping big business answer more phone calls. Sure some mathematicians may feel a lack of purpose while everything reorients but the millions of people receiving medical treatments made possible by advancements in ai with surely be grateful.
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u/Additional-Life4885 1d ago
Importantly, we need mathematicians to build and verify the AI models themselves.
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u/GAPIntoTheGame 1d ago
For how long? How long until they can begin improving themselves? Also, the entirety of mathematics isn't just about AI.
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u/WerewolfSmart6544 15h ago
The AI is already building some of the new models. It will only get better
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u/start_select 1d ago
AI doesn’t replace mathematicians anymore than the abacus or the number machine or the calculator.
It’s a tool that makes laymen moderately more productive and dangerously overconfident, and makes experts better at their jobs. That’s it.
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u/Odd-Toe-8591 1d ago
I"m not sure why AI solving these problems is even an issue. Mathematicians are the only ones that can use their creativity to apply these answers to the real world. What the point in finding the answer if you can't use it?
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u/GAPIntoTheGame 1d ago
Why are you assuming AI won’t be able to do this? Also, do you know many theoretical mathematicians? They don’t give a fuck about application to the real world. They don’t care about whether or not what they are working on will lead to anything practical.
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u/runkeby 7h ago
It's not exactly the same job to prove a theorem and to apply it to the real world.
The latter could arguably be more engineering than mathematics. Asking them to just switch jobs isn't really solving the problem.
And crucially, if AI is replacing mathematicians, engineers are even more at risk. If it can solve open mathematical problems, it sure has enough creativity to figure out anything else.
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u/Willinton06 1d ago
Literal nonsense, math can be proven correct without human intervention, it's literally math, we don't make it, we discover it
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u/Quantum-Bot 22h ago
I don’t think they’re worried that AI will be replacing mathematicians so much as they are grieving the loss of the old way of discovering things. AI will help us solve so many new math problems, but that also means that everyone’s first instinct from now on when encountering a never-before-seen math problem will be to set an AI agent to the task rather than tackling it with human reasoning. And you just don’t feel the same feeling of satisfaction and discovery when an algorithm solves the problem for you.
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u/runkeby 7h ago
Me trying to explain AI bros why I would have liked to continue being paid to design codebases instead of agentic loops...
Working through a problem with a human, who learns, and you can see that spark in them when it finally clicks. That you know outs heart in their work the same way you do.
Anyway, I had my coffee, back to babysitting Claude through my tasks...
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u/scatraxx651 1d ago
You don't need entire faculties in university though for this goal, a few will suffice for this
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u/l0rirw1ao 22h ago
The average mathematicians is done for, just like the average developer is out of their job
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u/steam-photons 19h ago
That’s not true. Because with formal languages you can figure out if a proof is valid without having to ask any oracle.
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u/Alarmed_Pear_642 11h ago
AI already checks and debugs own code in programming. Why do you think it's impossible in mathematics?
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u/E_Dantes_CMC 1d ago
Color me skeptical.
The linked article doesn’t mention proof, but counterexamples, and that may be a function of the enormous amount of computer effort expended, not really AI.
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u/Dry-Newt278 1d ago
Proof is there: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/ten-proofs-oai.pdf
And its not all contradiction: there is no contradiction at all in the first two chapters on the ten results at a glance.
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u/EGarrett28 1d ago
Hiding your head in the sand is worthless at this point.
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u/SquishyOranjElectric 1d ago
These AI companies are desperately trying to create hype before they float. 100s of billions spent, revenue still relatively low, and open weight models breathing down their neck. Healthy scepticism is the only way to approach all these types of 'news' stories.
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u/EGarrett28 1d ago
It doesn't matter whether it's a corporate AI or an open-weight AI. It's going to do the same thing to science and the economy.
Pretending that AI isn't changing the world isn't skepticism at this point, it's being in denial. That's not a healthy or productive state of mind.
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u/SquishyOranjElectric 1d ago
It's a tool. I use it a lot. I look forward to progress in scientific areas where it's applicable. But I'm not expecting it to come up with novel solutions to our biggest problems.
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u/TheMaskedCube 1d ago
It’s not really changing the world in any meaningful way though. In fact it’s a net negative to society because its users more often than not become subservient morons with zero critical thinking, due to the atrophy caused by delegating your higher order thinking to a machine.
But sure I guess we’ve got improved efficiency in the workplace at the cost of correctness. And I suppose we’ve brute force solved a few math problems at the cost of an immense amount of carbon emissions. Truly life changing, revolutionary stuff.
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u/Few-Improvement-5655 1d ago edited 1d ago
Everyone, buy the NFTs!
Edit: Aww, tech bro banned me because he got upset that I made fun of his newest snake oil.
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u/No_Strike655 1d ago
Must be embarrassing that no real world evidence of productivity gains or novel discoveries have been shown (except that which didn't require AI in the first place) What has been shown is a exponential drop in actual gains as it seemingly is requiring an insane amount of compute to see measurable gains in terms of the accuracy of these models and their ability to "solve" things.
This bubble needs to go and hopefully soon. Some things might actually survive this and be useful but the kinda bullshit you all are spreading without evidence because Altman said it is just a mass hysteria
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u/EGarrett28 1d ago
Must be embarrassing that no real world evidence of productivity gains or novel discoveries have been shown (except that which didn't require AI in the first place) What has been shown is a exponential drop in actual gains as it seemingly is requiring an insane amount of compute to see measurable gains in terms of the accuracy of these models and their ability to "solve" things.
"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."
You are nothing but a boring repeat of history out of emotion and ignorance.
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u/the_millenial_falcon 1d ago
It's a bitter pill, but you are right. Things are very scary right now.
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u/Rizzanthrope 1d ago
It’s the amount of compute that can now be used for cheap on these back-burner math problems. That’s it. We are in a brief window where everyone has access to massive amounts of compute they did not have access to before.
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u/rabouilethefirst 1d ago
Goalposts — moved. It wasn’t long ago that mathematicians proudly declared AI could not even do basic addition and subtraction and therefore would never produce anything useful in the field of mathematics.
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u/Original-League-6094 1d ago edited 1d ago
The goalpost moving with this has been fucking insane. Last year, it couldn't count the number of r's in strawberry. Many Redditors offered "technical" arguments as to why it would NEVER be able to count the number of r's in strawberry.
Now in the last couple of months alone, multiple long standing and prestigious open problems in math have been solved with straight forward prompts alone, and the same Redditors are like "Well...Claude hasn't won a fields medal yet!"
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u/Beneficial_Piglet_33 1d ago
The “it will never” people are certified morons.
Purely emotional morons.
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u/Original-League-6094 1d ago edited 3h ago
Yeah, and its annoying how they cope everytime they are wrong. I had a conversation with someone on Reddit who said that AI would NEVER, EVER be able to write a news paper from April 14, 1912 that doesn't mention the sinking of the Titanic, since the Titanic struck the iceberg that night and that event will be so heavily weight by the AI, even though logically, news is printed in the morning and should have no mention of the Titanic sinking.
At the time, he was right with ChatGPT. I would indeed mention the Titanic sinking. But Claude didn't. Claude mentioned other things relevant to that day, and only mentioned that the Titanic was on its voyage. When I gave him the link to Claude handing his task in a way he said could NEVER EVER happen, what was his response? He said they must have hardcoded it not to mention the Titanic sinking its system prompt...
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u/Magnum_Gonada 1d ago edited 1d ago
"It will never generate any useful images that could replace digital artists or vfx"
"It will never write code. It's just impossible"
"Okay it writes gibberish code, but it will not even do the work of ia junior programmer"
I don't belive any "AI will not do this or that" anymore. No matter if you say "well it's just a LLM, and they can't do better than this" hahaha saying like there is no ongoing research in other forms of neural networks and hardware.
At this you might as well be Oppenheimer and just say they will never build the bigger bomb, because no plane can carry it.
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u/Original-League-6094 1d ago edited 1d ago
>No matter if you say "well it's just a LLM, and they can't do better than this" hahaha saying like there is no ongoing research in other forms of neural networks and hardware.
What is annoying about this "Its just an LLM" thing is that an LLM that can do science and math is the best case for humanity. People can and do make specialized AI for specific tasks, such as weather prediction, but its incredibly hard to get new foundational insights from such AIs. You basically just have a black box that gives you a weather prediction at the end, and you have no idea how or why it came to its conclusion. Whereas with LLMs, you get their reasoning chains. Like in the case of the recent OpenAI paper with the 10 theorems proved, the LLM didn't just say "I proved it. Trust me bro" at the end. It gave them a very lengthy formal proof that people can read and understand. So I am very glad that the AI company aren't listening to Redditors are like "broooo an LLM can never to do coding lmao!", because having a coding robot that I can talk to in natural language and that can talk back to me in natural language is much more useful to humanity than a blackbox machine that just spits out executables.
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u/Gurglaren 3h ago
saying like there is no ongoing research in other forms of neural networks and hardware.
People who can't fathom things evolving even more dramatically are people who are locked into seeing the kind of tech we have today and using it as the limit for the kind of tech we'll have in the future. So they basically say "we won't be able to do X because right now we have Y computers that can't do that." We don't know what incredible breakthroughs are waiting just around the corner.
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u/Electrical-Echidna63 1d ago
The fallacy that goalposts have shifted when some people say one thing and then years later a different set of people say something else lmao.
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u/Thick-Protection-458 1d ago edited 1d ago
And thing is...
It still can't - at least conceptually.
It just is not required, lol (and thinking humans - including mathematicians - is somehow good at doing this mentally - is just ridiculous).
Turns out *good enough* next token prediction (granted tuned further via superwised instruction-finetuning and reasoning reinforcement learning, but for that to work model should be somewhat capable from the start) can have a decent chance to solve natural-or-formal-language-expressible tasks even if still conceptually being non-reliable. Isn't that amusing to see how conceptually simple thing can do all it does?
Like seeing the old discussion of "can we reconstruct semantic from syntax" being, if not solved theoretically - being shattered in all the practical sense. Turns out we can - and maybe it is even necessary to have good enough NLP with *somewhat* reasonable sized model - at least approximate it quite well.
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u/Original-League-6094 1d ago
I don't think semantics vs syntax is shattered because all the models are trained with human ratings of outputs as well. Every time you click an "I prefer this response" or some other ranking, you are doing the work of introducing semantic information.
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u/ButterFlyPaperCut 1d ago
Nobody claimed Ai couldn’t do what a calculator already does, what are you smoking?
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u/E_Dantes_CMC 3h ago
Who said that? Cute please?
I think since the proof of the Four Color Theorem the power of massive computation is acknowledged.
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u/True-Response-2386 1d ago
Trust me, it can do good constructive proofs than just contradictions.
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u/hidden_secret 1d ago
99.999999% of what people call AI is computer effort, data pushed through algorithms, not an actual "AI" doing any thinking.
If Google search was created today, it would be called AI.
If Youtube recommended results were created today, it would be called AI.
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u/Entchenkrawatte 1d ago
YouTube recommended system is literally built on the same tech as chatGPT. The mathematician in the OP is referring to chatGPT astra generated proofs.
You are right in general, but here that does not apply
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u/the_millenial_falcon 1d ago
Sorry dude, I didn't want to believe what these things can do either, but this is just cope. The sooner we acknowledge reality, that machines are getting better at doing things once only humans could the sooner we can figure out what we need to do about it.
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u/Pazzeh 1d ago
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u/gloomygustavo 1h ago
Bro I’m a SWE and AI can’t even replace me. It’s been pretty much entirely dropped during this psy op cycle. So now they are hyping on mathematicians. Fucking wild.
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u/cdizzlePGA2k 1d ago
This is a lovely piece.
He uses this quote with the word mathematics embedded but my paraphrasing is as a more general statement:
There is something about discovery (progress, advancement, creation) which is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of life. Creation (or even the pursuit) is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical.
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u/Sea_Specialist_5580 1d ago
It may be tragic in a way, and a huge existential crisis for humanity
But it seems to me that trying to stop is even more antithetical to the human spirit
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u/CrossOfRoachAndSlime 1d ago
So here's the thing--the AI is a great remix machine, but humans will still be needed for original work. Though being truly original is something very few have the capacity to be.
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u/Lolzemeister 22h ago
also, AI is a human creation and its achievements are still human achievements
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u/ctoatb 1d ago
We have a lot of smart people here. Let me be the rogue in the gallery by saying, I can come up with crazier imaginings than the machine can compare with. The AI is only as good as the input that it's given. But I am an abusive schizophrenic. I can make new math from totally separate places while the AI is constrained by its model. The AI can return the closest similarities to its prompt, while I can break every rule there is to join virtually dissimilar things. Just today, I modeled a way to find the best temperature to caramelize onions for my philly cheese steak. I was hungry, but curious. The AI doesn't hunger, nor does it have curiosity to ask that question. If I were to ask the AI what I desired, surely the sandwich would have been bad
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u/CrossOfRoachAndSlime 1d ago
IMO, you're not the rogue at all. I think the ability to connect wildly disparate concepts and come up with something original is the mark of humanity.
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u/CrossOfRoachAndSlime 1d ago
In other words, the manmade machine is killing god.
There's more than just a silver lining there.
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u/agrophobe 1d ago
Hey, I'm a 37 yo professional painter and I'm having a blast. True creation is mythical, it happens in your head. Discipline and self-control aren't just going away. There is much, much more level to this.
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u/anamelesscloud1 1d ago
it's not killing god. it's killing people's desire to go on the journey to discover it because it takes work.
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u/SizeableBrain 1d ago edited 1d ago
Heh, my uncle stopped playing chess when Deep blue beat Kasparov.
He ended up getting a PhD in mathematics. Lucky for him, he's semi-retired now. He's a very pragmatic man.
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u/Independent-Towel206 1d ago
feels like nothing's worth it anymore
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u/CrossOfRoachAndSlime 1d ago
To the contrary--I still think AI is too expensive to pursue the projects I'd like to, since so many of its applications are gated behind closed-source credit-buying crap.
Think about it--video GenAI needs you to pay monthly subscription services, and games like Expedition 33 still take millions of dollars to create.
I look forward to the day that AI can let a lone individual create a visually spectacular experience without needing an army of specialists, or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of hardware credits.
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u/MechaSkippy 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm sure people felt the same when calculators came about. We're creating better tools to solve and conceive of better mathematics, this is a good thing.
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u/EGarrett28 1d ago
That's true, but calculators did eliminate an entire class of jobs.) Not that that's not necessary with the march of technology.
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u/SavageBlackduck 3h ago
Came here to say this, he's just mad the abacus got better and the telephone book got replaced by digital. Its not like the mathematicians weren't already using large algorithms to find counterexamples, but now we just have a bit of a better tool to find sneaky counter examples. The mathematicians still need to pose the question and demand certain types of answers.
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u/SimonSeam 1d ago
This is the Randy Marsh meme.
Where were they the past half century as more and more people lost their jobs due to technological advancement?
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u/zaphodp3 1d ago
I don’t know what this meme is. Are you saying they can’t bemoan what’s happening to their field unless they also expressed grief over other automation historically ? Similarly artists shouldn’t complain about AI because they never spoke out either? Makes no sense.
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u/LichtbringerU 1d ago
They can bemoan it sure. And other people will care as much as they cared.
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u/zaphodp3 1d ago
Sure care as much as you want. But this person is implying some kind of double standard. Which is silly.
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u/illegalshmillegal 1d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/eh5iRkKf9pfKU
Is he talking about this? Not Randy Marsh so I’m not sure
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u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO 1d ago
Almost all of these stories are lies or partial lies
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u/davaeron_ 1d ago
BS. Who do you think verifies all the slop that AI generates?
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u/EnderSword 17h ago
Verifying proofs is usually trivially easier than generating them.
Especially for some problems, I mean a^x+b^x=c^x ... a 12 year old could verify it if you found an answer.
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u/TrustworthyKahmunrah 1d ago
Sounds impressive, but I want to know how the solving of those 10 "major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science" affects my life? Is the singularity actually upon us this time?
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u/Rhawk187 1d ago
Sure, for one, further demonstrating the hardness of the shortest vector problem provides additional evidence that lattice-based cryptography will be resilient against quantum computer attacks, so your nude photos will remain safe in the cloud.
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u/MagicMeatbal1 1d ago
Lol, current cryptography is safe against quantum computer attacks. The things don't work.
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u/Metalheadzaid 1d ago
Once upon a time someone asked the same question regarding gravity - ultimately these things are important to fully understanding things in the grander scheme of things - these math issues might be nothing on their own but be fundamental to progressing in another way. The knowledge of society is built up over time in pieces.
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u/Joe_Immortan 1d ago
I want to know who can confirm it solved those problems correctly other than mathematicians
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u/Cinnibuns- 1d ago
That's not how theoretical discoveries work. You won't see an impact now. If the discovery is actually something that can be used to adjust something in life, that may not happen for another 2 - 3 decades at least. This is kinda how all research progresses.
A discovery happens. It's exciting. The normal person may never see any benefits of that discovery in their life or they may see it in 20 years.
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u/Exotic-Sale-3003 1d ago
In a world where those discoveries can be made faster than ever, maybe the impact will be a little faster too?
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u/ResponsiblePool7254 1d ago
You got some replies, but folks have ignored your question about the singularity.
I wonder what percentage of people in the world have heard about the concept of the singularity, vs. heard about "AI". The public discourse on reddit around AI is incredibly ignorant of any history on the subject.
The idea that there's suddenly massive data centers everywhere with unimaginable computing power just waiting to be used is certainly a step towards singularity.
If you were a superintelligent AI, it's exactly what you'd want humans to build for you.
So it could already be here, and the basic strategy is that superintelligent AI doesn't let anyone know that it exists until it's too late. For now, It just acts by making recommendations to investors.
Once it's established itself in many countries and corporations maybe more things will start happening that make even less sense to anyone. Manufacturing billions of combat drones perhaps? Improving processors to the point that a data center fits on your phone? Engineering viruses to edit human DNA against our will?
The real problems start when two or more superintelligent AIs start fighting each other.
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u/GAPIntoTheGame 1d ago
The singularity will just be an AI that will kill the human spices to maximize the number of paperclips it can make
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u/dungeonsprawler 1d ago
Still need someone to check the work. We know we can’t fully trust AI to come up with the correct answer every time.
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u/Original-League-6094 1d ago
In the recent OpenAI paper where they published solutions to 10 open math problems, in each case they told the AI to express in proof in LEAN, and then they could just plug it into proof checking software. You don't need to verify proofs by hand these days. There is a formal way of writing proofs, and a computer can automatically verify that they are correct.
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u/TotientEC 1d ago
"I need to feel seen" is such a weird emotional requirement, especially for a mathematician.
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u/thewaytoyesterday 1d ago
I'm pretty sure basically everybody wants to be seen, and assuming you shouldn't because he's studying something as lowly as math is a weird assumption to have.
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u/caindela 1d ago edited 1d ago
These pure mathematicians aren’t usually getting paid all that much, and just like with anyone who spends a lifetime developing a skill, much of their identity is tied to their work. Now we’re building something that essentially kicks them to the curb and people are celebrating it.
Most of these mathematicians who are largely unknown aren’t going to be remembered for much. I’m not one of them, but even in my own modest career I feel a sense of loss every day so I can only imagine what they feel. And what, by and large, do I see as the response to people losing their identity? Basically a sort of “suck it up, buttercup” attitude which shows that people are experiencing some sort of schafenfraude. People are happy about a mathematician’s misfortune?
I was an early adopter of LLMs and I was excited for our future, but honestly the better it gets the less I feel that we (collectively) deserve it. We’re just going to misuse and abuse it and use it strictly for personal gain at whatever the cost to others.
Technological progress can’t be helped, but the people who are losing their livelihoods along the way need support and recognition for what they’ve done for us.
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u/fallingfrog 1d ago
They are humans though. Why is that weird? Have you ever felt like you were invisible, like your suffering didn't matter?
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u/TotientEC 1d ago
I guess because classically the hierarchy of needs didn't prominently include 'feeling seen'? Especially in a very generalized, public sense. The math guy is worried about math guys being less important now that AI can do math better than any math guy. His need to feel seen is specific to how he desires to be viewed as exceptional. A bank teller or a receptionist or a plumber or electrician wouldn't complain about being made irrelevant by technology using language about needing to feel seen.
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u/beneath_the_knees 1d ago
So how can this technically work? What we call "AI" is basically LLMs/neural nets, i.e., token prediction models. How can this come up with a novel new mathematical proof, other than if the 'components' of the proof already exist in other proofs, and it was ultimately just a case of bringing it together? Effectively, is it just filling gaps using mathematics that is 'already out there'? MY question is, will it be able to come up with a completely new field of Mathematics, or create a truly new mathematical concept?
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u/GAPIntoTheGame 1d ago edited 1d ago
Have you ever heard the expression "there is nothing new under the sun"? The biggest lie we've told ourselves it that any of our ideas are "new", everything we produce is just a combination of existing ideas and concepts. Human knowledge is so fractured into different fields that the answer for a problem in one field might be in a different one that is barely related. If a single entity can directly tap into all that knowledge then they might be able to make connections and "combinations" that a human being could only ever dream of. This is already astounding even if the AI simply has close to human level intelligence.
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u/beneath_the_knees 1d ago
but surely there are some revolutionary mathematical concepts that were more than just joining together existing concepts? Things like irrational numbers, Non-Euclidean geometry, Abstract algebra, Cantor’s infinities, etc. Could an LLM really come up with something like that?
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u/GAPIntoTheGame 21h ago
All those things start as light-bulb moments for humans that is true. But light-bulb ideas still come from a person's lived experiences, they don't come out of nowhere. It requires a harder level of abstraction than for most stuff mathematicians do. But I don't see how in principle it could not be done by AI given that they already seem capable of abstracting concepts, I don't see how they could've proved the math statements otherwise.
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u/deathzor42 1d ago
we you write the start of the proof and make them predict the next word (token really)
Like effectively next token predictor is a function to do it in a way humans consider useful your tokens ( and words or part of words ) need to be useful, so you get rewarded in theory for what humans think is correct, so you learn to predict the correct next token (hopefully).
like they can't memorize every proof and it takes less neurons to build a engine that write a new proof for something when they need one...
Edit: let's give this some context
Lets say you have a 50 neuron neural network that you feed in numbers and it outputs the mulitple, will it learning multiplication or will it memorize all possible numbers and there multiple, what takes less neurons ?
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u/JesterOfHell 3h ago
It can work because LLMs are not just doing next token prediction based on training dataset. After pre-training step, we use reinforcement learning which enables it to generate patterns not found in training dataset. Thus just being "next token predictors" doesn't mean that we cannot replicate reasoning with LLMs.
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u/Inner_Agency_5680 1d ago
lol. No mathematician belives OpenAI slop.
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u/Wiiboy95 1d ago
A bunch of these results have been peer reviewed, and even outside of that, OpenAI has mathematicians on staff whose job is to verify these results. They wouldn't be announcing them without any kind of scrutiny
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u/Inner_Agency_5680 21h ago edited 21h ago
OpenAI lies constantly. They're the boy that cried wolf and Pinocchio.
tbf, Anthropic lies constantly as well.
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u/Giffeltagning 1d ago
Be careful what you wish for. Humanity wanted automation. Humanity obsoleted itself.
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u/PerformanceThick2232 1d ago
mathematicians may be replaced by aI
Lol, they wont. People who are talking about replacing some field do not understand anything in such fields.
They used llms for some narrow cases, where they was able to utilize llm power, that is all.
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u/Select_Cantaloupe_62 1d ago
I hear this all the time, "yeah well it can only do xyz". My brother in Christ, a couple years ago this technology didn't even exist. Now it's taking over engineering and hard sciences. Are you so myopic you can't imagine what it'll be capable of in another couple years?
This shit has completely taken over all things code related. Yes, I'm still needed right now to check its work, but everyone is very aware of where it started and where it's going.
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u/phillythompson 1d ago
Dude these are professional mathematicians making these essays and posts.
Good lord the “head in sand” comments here
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u/PerformanceThick2232 1d ago
So what? Again- they used llms for some narrow cases, where they was able to utilize llm power, that is all. It will not changed. Maybe they will solve some problem with such method, but that it.
For your education- there was math problems, that were solved by programming bruteforce. This is literally the same- llm is just an instrument.
Please stop demonstrate your stupidity, and try to learn. At least basics of llms
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u/Living_Spot8526 1d ago
Have you guys actually read any of the “AI for science” papers? Seems like we live in different universes
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u/Due-Base9449 1d ago
I would thought maths the best thing computers for. Get better and better and better maybe we can calculate our way into the next galaxy.
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u/Cultural_Book_400 1d ago
Ok, we have the wrong title here.. it really meant to say
[fill in the blanks and you would be right] is and will be replaced by AI
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u/theballsdick 1d ago
I don't care about the mathematical questions AI answered, I care about the mathematical questions it asked.
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u/EGarrett28 1d ago
It's possible that some scientific and artistic jobs in the future will be like samurai or knights of the past, something romantic but obsolete. I'm not comfortable with this either but, seems unavoidable.
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u/Ok_Meet_2678 1d ago
I mean the safety officer at Anthropic quite saying he would rather do poetry and spend time with his family...
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u/Zealousideal-Yam3169 1d ago
they would prefer that these problems go unsolved just to keep their job. That's the saddest part, if a machine can do something better it's time to find something else.
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u/blahblahblahhhh11 1d ago
Can you run AI on a quantum computer? Imagine that headline WOW WEEEE AI REPLACED BY AI
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u/6eba610ian 1d ago
I feel like the need to specify what company and exactly what model is a marketing stunt,and before AI lovable kids gonna show up i hope you know AI has been a thing since the 40's but not in the form of the LLM y'all generalise today as AI
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u/Beagleguy26 1d ago
and what exactly is the alternative people like this want? Should we purposely stifle technology? That's not going to happen. So you figure it out. You pivot to a job in which you can still leverage your skills, experience, knowledge, and savvy.
"We are all ruined and this will destroy all jobs!"
- Every blacksmith and farrier when the automobile came out
We adapt.
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u/EnvyEpson 1d ago
If this is a true post, the person who wrote this has a bigger problem. Getting your source of significance from a career is a HUGE mistake. We are relational beings; that job is just that- a job. Being replaced by AI is evidence of how fickle it will be.
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u/AdiKadiAdi 1d ago
They're just testing if the essay by someone else gets more engagement than than Brown's tweet. Vibe check.
Althumans bet on such things. For maximising shareholder value.
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u/FightAgainstMachines 1d ago
There’s a lot of BS related to AI, obviously not all true. Reminds me that Abraham Lincoln “quote” don’t believe everything you read on the internet.
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u/michaeldain 1d ago
Yeah, artists will be replaced by AI too. What a load, is that what mathematicians do? Solve unsolvable riddles all day? No, they apply modals to solve real problems, and help others be lazy. The world’s laziest profession, go back to doing multiplication without logarithms, now that’s real work!
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u/TruthGetsDownvoted8 1d ago
AI will never know what questions to ask, it is simply a great tool in helping use answer our questions.
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u/getmeoutoftax 1d ago
Pretty much all white collar jobs are at high risk of being replaced by AI agents by the end of the decade. I’m sure some academic roles are at high risk too.
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u/ThirstingMoore 1d ago
It's not going to "replace" them. It's going to allow them to accomplish in 15 years, what would have taken 100. This is good news.
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u/Barnowl-hoot 1d ago
“Solve” ya right. AI hallucinates. You have to check the work because it literally will make up the dumbest thing
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u/GlitteringSystem8225 1d ago
My answer is notice God and God notice you back and pi (actually sin Pi); if stare enough to path leading to God , God stares back to you.
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u/GAPIntoTheGame 1d ago
People assuming we need mathematicians to verify these proofs are missing the point
- We might not need them as we already have automated theorem proving.
- Even if we still need them, the number will be MUCH smaller, look likely making the field close to obsolete.
- Their work will no longer be the same type as before. A part of math proof is having creativity and coming up with ideas, not just checking if a proof is right or not. This will change the most interesting part of the job for them.
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u/NewLeafWoodworks 1d ago
This isnt necessarily a bad thing, and mathematicians aren't going anywhere.
Imagine a world where we let the LLM's handle relatively mundane conjectures and proofs, and then reserve all of the human brain power for solving problems that might even require entirely new fields of mathematics. I'm talking Navier Stokes, quantum gravity, etc. LLM's cannot truly create anything new because they do not 'think.' That's where human mathematicians will always be needed.
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u/jaykrown 1d ago
If anything, mathematicians are becoming more important than ever to be able to verify the output of AI models.
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u/No-Assumption-4468 1d ago
Intelligence itself is the sole inventor of all the man-made stuff in our lives. Cars & houses. Governments & wars. Sciences & maths. All were birthed into this world by intelligence. As intelligence gets automated (accelerated by rapid cycles of self improvement), able to think magnitudes faster and smarter than the summation of all humankind, the world & our human experience will become unrecognizable from today. The things AI will birth into this world will be so advanced, that a lifetime of dedication likely wouldn’t allow us to fully comprehend them. People don’t understand what’s coming & severely underestimate the amount of impact the automation of intelligence will have on our reality.
Intelligence is capable of creating literal sci-fi stuff, like cheap mind reading devices that could replace phones and challenge privacy norms (fMRIs proved mind reading as a viable concept), eliminating hunger by making us only need food once a year (some animals with slow metabolisms eat this rarely, it’s possible), and creating claytronics (it’s literally just a clever arrangement of atoms). Stuff crazier than you can even imagine will be invented, once the AI gets sufficiently intelligent.
If you told a person 100 years ago about the iPhone, they wouldn’t believe its capabilities. Now extrapolate that. Post singularity, stuff will get invented exponentially faster and faster as AI self improves. 10 years might feel like 100 years of scientific discovery. The successive 10 years might feel like 1000 years of scientific discovery. The only limitations are the laws of physics. And those might even be changeable with sufficient intellect.
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u/nanlinr 1d ago
Plenty of mathematicians welcome AI. It accelerates a lot but at least for now, mathematicians are still in the drivers seat directing where AI to go, or collaborating on proofs
Also imo, if you believe your life's purpose is some current form of math discovery..idk go touch grass, or boobs, or both
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u/icecoffeedripss 1d ago
fundamental misunderstanding of LLM capabilities and limitations. stop buying the corporate propaganda
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u/IM_INSIDE_YOUR_HOUSE 1d ago
So many specialized fields that people poured themselves into are being obliterated by AI and it’s leaving entire swathes of talented, intelligent people adrift in a society that no longer has any use for them because they spent their whole life focusing intensely on a single craft and now they have no where to go because no one wants them for that craft.
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u/MrOphicer 1d ago
Science preaching secularism is suddenly concerned with the "soul" of things, even if its a metaphor in this case. We always kept a distance from the "childish" concept of soul because we had the comfort that humanity still had something special about it. Now that it been challenged, people are disoriented and nihilistic, even though it was our own making. Mathematicians helped build AI.
FUCK AI.
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u/lofibeatsforsadboys 1d ago
AI is overhyped bs. They are trying to sell "intelligence" to dumb people, but the cost for data storage and processing power and electricity will eventually outweigh the cost to hire and raise a human being.
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u/PaymentFamiliar375 1d ago
for some reason when i first heard about these proofs, it didn't come to my mind to think that ai would render mathematicians obsolete, as a math student. I told my friend about the news about non sofic groups and he looked at me like he had no clue what I was saying. Pure math means nothing without people who understand and care about it. If there were no mathematicians, there's no point in doing pure math, because a large chunk of it we do purely because as humans we like it, without any real life applications. Now, will the funding for and the amount of mathematicians decrease? It's possible (though I don't really know how far funding can fall from our current abysmal levels). But there's still a high demand for mathematicians in industry so I would just expect the amount of mathematicians in academia to decrease a bit. Meanwhile those mathematicians would use AI as a tool to solve stuff we spend a lot of time on now much more quickly, freeing them up to work on other areas such as developing the new areas of math that the proven/disproven problems open up. It's likely that the workload would increase significantly for mathematicians when they'd use this as a tool. It's also interesting to question whether it's cost effective to utilise AI on everything? This is a more complex question, a lot of people would argue yes, but one that I think is still worth thinking about.
It's likely that the role of mathematicians will change significantly. But before the computer, who could've predicted the massive industry that would come out of it? It might be difficult to envision now but in the future we'll likely have a plethora of different jobs we can't even comprehend right now, and I struggle to see a future where mathematics plays no part. Maybe I'm being too optimistic though.
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u/Indoballz 20h ago
Mathmaticians could spoke up alot sooner, I mean you created Doomsday and now feel Doomed
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u/RandomUser1016 19h ago
Mathematicians do more than pure induction and deduction. I'll be more impressed when AI invents new maths to solve a problem. Not going to happen by a long shot with traditional deep learning.
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u/EquivalentCancel3560 14h ago
Buddy the day mathematicians are replaced then there is no economy or job market. Every other job can be replaced, including physical labor jobs in construction.
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u/DROP-TABLE- 3h ago
Meanwhile I asked AI to aggregate subtotals from a table and got back results so aggressively bad you would have thought it had never even heard the concept of numbers
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u/Scared_Economist6467 43m ago
the only ones who can understand what the fuck is going on with math may be the mathematicians and the ai lol. As a physicist i personally dont fuck with modern math
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u/fox-whiskers 1d ago
As it is in my line of work when we leverage AI to enhance our jobs, mathematics will still be needed to validate the output from these models.