[pevansgreenwood]

This post about GPT-5 helping with quantum complexity theory highlights how we're still thinking about these systems wrong.

The AI suggested using Tr[(I-E(θ))^-1] to analyze eigenvalue behavior—a clever combination of existing mathematical techniques, not some mystical breakthrough.

This is exactly what you'd expect from a system trained on mathematical literature: sophisticated pattern matching across formal languages, combining known approaches in useful ways.

The real question isn't "how did AI get so smart?" but "why do we keep being surprised when language models excel at manipulating structured formal languages?"

Mathematics is linguistics. Of course these systems are good at it.