[serious_angel]

    > The AIs will exceed humans in taste and intuition...  
    > The AIs will be better teachers than the humans. In any case, there won’t be a human audience for expository work of frontier math.  
    > No human needs to understand any of it...

Absolute nonsense. I am sorry, but... is it appropriate to not consider the author sick or having some mental disorder?

It seems like the person has no idea what they are talking about, or just too sarcastic to the point of idiotism.

[Grimblewald]

While I agree the claims may be strong, they're not inconceivable. I still think current AI architectures are fundamentally incapable of replacing us in any of the ways discussed, however it is now something I consider plausible as seeing happen in my lifetime.

[fidotron]

Furthermore, any attempt to pretend otherwise is an appeal to the idea we are in literal fact haunted by our own internal demons that are inexplicable to science or mathematics.

One of the effects of this entire debate is it's exposed how many people claiming to be pure mechanistic rationalists actually never were. At least those of an openly religious inclination have been sticking to their position consistently.

[placebo]

Agreed. Unfortunately some religious inclinations can be just as tedious as pure mechanistic rational inclinations, even if they are consistent. Fortunately, these are not the only two options available. The future that the article points to is not necessarily only bad news - it might be the uncomfortable truth required to transcend our limiting beliefs.

[bananaflag]

I work in math and also believe in this stuff and have done so for years. You may call me sick if you wish so.

My only cope among those was, using the author's words, "We will teach the mathematics AI discovers." This was back in 2018, before GPT-2. I abandoned it when I realized AIs will become better at explaining math before they become better at doing math.

I still have some hope in the last one "mathematicians and the mathematically-inclined will still do math on their own". Maybe some limited communities of this sort will form.

[js8]

> AIs will become better at explaining math before they become better at doing math

I am not so sure. I am talking about math with AI and I feel as a math teacher, it is terrible. It introduces new notation and concepts faster than I can ask for definitions. It doesn't provide many examples. Sometimes it realizes it made a mistake in a guess and the confusion compounds.

Maybe it's just my (in)experience - but I would welcome a practical advice on how it could explain math to me better.

[pfdietz]

It's another example of Moravec's Paradox. Explaining something to another person uses capabilities that go back millions of years. Mathematics goes back thousands of years. Evolution has made us very good at verbal communication, not so good at proving theorems. So it should have been expected that machines would have an easier time proving results than explaining them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

[bananaflag]

By explaining, I just meant writing papers in a human-readable way. For example, the results yesterday were also written up by AI.

Explaining in the sense of getting someone who doesn't get math to actually get math, giving illustrative examples and so on, maybe AIs are not good at, but anyway it's not something I enjoy much.

[js8]

I am OK with reading (decently-written) papers, something that a graduate can read. I still don't think that AI is good at it.

I am not sure what writeup you refer to. I have looked at proofs of 10 problems from Open AI written in Lean, I would not call a megabyte of Lean with no comments a good exposition.

[TimorousBestie]

> I still have some hope in the last one "mathematicians and the mathematically-inclined will still do math on their own". Maybe some limited communities of this sort will form.

I think it’s pretty likely. Contrary to all the negative things said about mathematicians in this thread, in my experience they’re mostly not profit-driven (for the ones that are tend to filter out of academia during grad school, it’s a high-effort, low-reward environment).

Tao does not seem particularly threatened by AIs doing math, and I trust his judgment.