"If you just waited a year, would some other AI produce that same proof independently?"
I had a conversation about this very problem last November, with a visiting mathematician. It's essentially signaling a deflationary spiral in intellectual work: why bother doing the work now, when it will take half as much effort a year from now?
This is perhaps always a possible stance, but it's exacerbated when some proportion of your own agency is handed over to, well, agents.
I like this observation very much. Intellectual deflationary spiral is exactly how it feels at the moment and we might end up in a worse place because of it.
The overselling of AI abilities is doing such a disservice to society right now. These companies don’t want to acknowledge how much human collaboration is going into their AI’s achievements because it undermines their value proposition, but I imagine there’s still quite a fair amount going into it and that’s one reason why OpenAI still won’t provide session traces of their models solving open math problems. If they were more transparent about it I think we’d see that human guidance, vision, judgement, taste, and other traits are still highly valuable and complimentary to AI abilities. It should also be a huge red flag how little of any of this output has been formally verified by third parties. I do think AI will eventually do all the things people believe it’s already doing, but I suspect there’s a fair amount of mechanical turking going on behind the scenes as you’d expect any company trying to raise a trillion dollar public offering might do.
It’s funny how disconnected we all are from each other. This is exactly how LLMs felt a year or so to many programmers.
Useless toys, sometimes useful toys, ok good toys, ok.. we might have to look at this more carefully, oh god.
This loop however is quite tiring to watch happen over and over again. Is there really nothing we can do but just watch from the sidelines and watch our fellow men engage in their particular grief and copium filled mourning cycle?
About two years ago, I was at a coffee shop and two maths students were trying to understand a concept in the book. I suggested they might ask a language model to help them understand it. They scoffed at me, called a stochastic parrot, and said they can't do math at all.
I responded with, "Well, you don't even need it to do math. It can explain the concept." They scoffed again. "Those things are useless toys"
Reading comments like this is so depressing because it was extremely obvious that better results were a matter of time/hardware. It evokes the seem feeling as that trump quote about "who knew healthcare could be so complicated".
"If you just waited a year, would some other AI produce that same proof independently?"
I had a conversation about this very problem last November, with a visiting mathematician. It's essentially signaling a deflationary spiral in intellectual work: why bother doing the work now, when it will take half as much effort a year from now?
This is perhaps always a possible stance, but it's exacerbated when some proportion of your own agency is handed over to, well, agents.
That's the theme of this reflection: https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/08/why-i-chose-to-do-ma...
I like this observation very much. Intellectual deflationary spiral is exactly how it feels at the moment and we might end up in a worse place because of it.
related
Lex Fridman recent podcast on the AI crisis in math, https://youtu.be/ZAzWPE9CItg
3b1b recent podcast with Steven Strogatz on the Humanity of Math, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUSznTR2cwc
Point 19, right in the feels :(
The overselling of AI abilities is doing such a disservice to society right now. These companies don’t want to acknowledge how much human collaboration is going into their AI’s achievements because it undermines their value proposition, but I imagine there’s still quite a fair amount going into it and that’s one reason why OpenAI still won’t provide session traces of their models solving open math problems. If they were more transparent about it I think we’d see that human guidance, vision, judgement, taste, and other traits are still highly valuable and complimentary to AI abilities. It should also be a huge red flag how little of any of this output has been formally verified by third parties. I do think AI will eventually do all the things people believe it’s already doing, but I suspect there’s a fair amount of mechanical turking going on behind the scenes as you’d expect any company trying to raise a trillion dollar public offering might do.
Are you suggesting the ~500 mathematical results they have released over the past year are primarily human discovered?
I think they would have employ just about every mathematician on earth for that to make sense.
This is very similar to how I feel programming.
It’s funny how disconnected we all are from each other. This is exactly how LLMs felt a year or so to many programmers.
Useless toys, sometimes useful toys, ok good toys, ok.. we might have to look at this more carefully, oh god.
This loop however is quite tiring to watch happen over and over again. Is there really nothing we can do but just watch from the sidelines and watch our fellow men engage in their particular grief and copium filled mourning cycle?
About two years ago, I was at a coffee shop and two maths students were trying to understand a concept in the book. I suggested they might ask a language model to help them understand it. They scoffed at me, called a stochastic parrot, and said they can't do math at all.
I responded with, "Well, you don't even need it to do math. It can explain the concept." They scoffed again. "Those things are useless toys"
IMO they weren't exactly wrong... 2 years ago.
2 years ago LLMs were a great tech demo but were mostly awful for actual practical purposes and hallucinated almost as much as they got right.
They'd be wrong today, but that's a different thing.
Reading comments like this is so depressing because it was extremely obvious that better results were a matter of time/hardware. It evokes the seem feeling as that trump quote about "who knew healthcare could be so complicated".