[vlovich123]

Can AI solve “toy” math problems that computers have not been able to do? Yes. Can AI produce novel math research? No, it hasn’t yet. So “AI will not do math for us” is only factually wrong if you take the weaker definition of “doing math for us”. The stronger definition is not factually wrong yet.

More problematic with that statement is that a timeline isn’t specified. 1 year? Probably not. 10 years? Probably. 20 years? Very likely. 100 years? None of us here will be alive to be proven wrong but I’ll venture that that’s a certainty.

[khafra]

This is a pretty strong position to take in the comments of a post where a mathematician declared the 5 problems he'd seen to be PhD level, and speculated that the real difficulty with switching from numerical answers to proofs will be finding humans qualified to judge the AI's answers.

I will agree that it's likely none of us here will be alive to be proven wrong, but that's in the 1 to 10 year range.

[vlovich123]

solving PhD level problems != producing new lines of research. PhDs are typically given problems their advisors know are solvable but difficult and might contribute in some way to a larger scope of research the PhD doesn’t yet understand or hasn’t earned the “right” to explore on their own. And phds do frequently do their own research exploration, but that doesn’t involve solving these kinds of “PhD-level” problems which just means having the knowledge about the techniques available and creativity in applying to solving them (as evidenced by the poster noting how they could solve some of these on their own fairly quickly).

I don’t see how my position is so exceptionally strong. I’m saying indeed there’s a 55-70% probability that this happens in the 1-10 year time frame. At 1-20 it goes up to 70-90%. It’s still important to leave room for doubt that we might miss something or be unable to build something for a long time. Trying to state otherwise seems like an even stronger position to take to me.

[khafra]

Yeah, I made the right reply, but to the wrong person. bubble12345 was confidently wrong, and bufferoverflow got downvoted for correcting him, but your caveats to his answer were fine; and that PDF is well within the sane range, even if mine is substantially tighter.