[lemma1729]

I am a number theorist and a graduate math student at Bonn. It is eery to see that all of a sudden everyone cares about pure math. Anyhow, I think such incidents like this one are only to happen more often in the coming days, and while many mathematicians are concerned about their role in the community; I believe since we are still very early stages of AI-driven discovery, we still need the appropriate infrastructure for human-AI research, such as with versioning for proofs, a bigger library than mathlib and a central reasoning space so traces aren't lost- which happens to be the most valuable training data for models, and without which, these discoveries do not help much at advancing the field, and remain as blackbox.

[treszkai]

> without which, these discoveries do not help much at advancing the field,

At least the fact that frontier models are not optimized primarily on formal math reasoning is in itself is good for not putting mathematicians out of their jobs, isn't it?

How do these results (and the future painted by them) affect your profession; do you expect a similar route as in software, where junior developers are unemployable, LLM-assisted development is the norm, and that great developers stand out partly through better communication with their managers?

[lemma1729]

I think in short term, it will get better, as more funding flows from industry to academia, you will see a spur in well-compensated PhD positions. However, in the long run, while I doubt that mathematicians will go extinct, they might have to move on to industries like in trading, chip-making, where they oversee AI models write code and also proof that the code works and is consistent with other parts of the software. However, until we have infrastructure for human-AI math research, as Tao himself said that the "roads" for human-AI research is yet to be built, humans would simply be working FOR AI models, and not working WITH AI, which will truly scale discoveries at a massive scale.