[HarHarVeryFunny]

I feel like this kind of "result dump" just cheapens mathematics. How about having a little respect for those whose work this builds on, and current mathematicians some of who may have spent years working on these problems.

Rather than sitting on these results until they had enough for a "shock and awe" 10-result dump, how about releasing these results individually as they were made/verified, as well as the failures (equally valuable to assess the current capabilities of LLMs), and try to make some analysis of HOW these breakthrough results were made. What were the prompts for each of these, how much guidance was there from the mathematicians employed by OpenAI, and most importantly how did the model arrive at these results ... what lines of reasoning resulted it in exploring ideas that humans had previously not explored?

[shshshsbe]

I know it’s tough, but I am not a fan of elitism. Mathematics is no different from all other branches which themselves are just intellectual labor which is again just a special type of labor. There is nothing magical about it and if computers can trivialize it, so be it.

Where were all the mathematicians and academics in general when “regular joe” was automated? Now it’s hitting close to home and their foreheads are starting to get sweaty. I’d say let them. Tough luck. Make mathematics as “cheap” as possible. Nobody owes them any favors.

Let’s commoditize “being smart” and let go of arbitrary divisions between us.

[false-mirror]

I'd prefer the reverse approach. Let's value the "regular Joe" instead of cheapening everyone.

[zer00eyz]

This is what the Ludites were trying to accomplish with an (armed) uprising.

Go back 100 years and 15 percent of the population was "Farmer", and 30 percent were in some sort of "domestic" work.

Most modern jobs are a product of the fact that technology continues to advance. And by all measures it does not look like "ai" is going to change that.

[znjssjnsns]

Yes, but in practice that doesn’t happen. Again, I did not hear a loud protest against automation of all types of labor from the intelligentsia in the past.

In practice automation is great, as long as it doesn’t hit “the ones that matter” (a label which they themselves assign). I find it very hard to not imagine the smallest, tiniest violin playing the saddest song for them.

Again, “respect for mathematicians” and “their work”.. please. Just produce results. That’s all that ever mattered and let’s not change the rules of the game just because they don’t suit you anymore.

[skew-aberration]

Protests against automation, or for the restructuring of society to accommodate automation without causing suffering of laborers, etc, is literally one of the largest and most extensively discussed topics in modern history.

[robotpepi]

that's an incredibly narrow view of what's happening.

[alanbernstein]

Not that I disagree, but I think this is how many people feel about AI output in fields they care about.

It's also a funny historical mirror to an earlier phase of math proof culture: in a previous era, cryptic result dumps were quite common.

[moezd]

That is the point: Make "X can be done by AI" common discourse and watch industries "being disrupted". At least with open weights we'd be able to verify the claims.

[yomismoaqui]

Anti-AI rethoric is getting ridiculous.

[seanmcdirmid]

You can actually do all of that meta analysis if you have the conversation that led to the solution. This is as easy as just having people release logs of their conversations, and then you can load it into another LLM as context to ask a bunch of questions about it.

I hope this will be normal practice eventually. “Show your work” is trivial if you use AI to solve a problem.

[znjssjnsns]

It is so incredibly liberating to see the intellectual elite struggling with was already reality for 99% of the rest of us: your understanding is not required, it might in fact be detrimental as it amounts to a handbrake on progress.

Understanding never was the goal, results were. We will be getting boatloads of those. What does your understanding get us? You get a fancy house out of it and you might be intellectually stimulated by it, sure, but I hope you can see how that does not constitute a valid need for the rest of society to labor just to support your class and its lifestyle.

[dahart]

> your understanding is not required

Whoa, how quickly have we forgotten how the AI is trained?

> You get a fancy house […] society to labor just to support your class and its lifestyle.

Wait, how much money do you think math teachers make? Do you know how much money AI engineers make in comparison? Why the animus and insecurity toward education? You are making math teachers sound far more rich and powerful than they actually are.

> Understanding never was the goal

Hard disagree

[robotpepi]

what are even "results" in mathematics if not understanding? for instance, what's the utility of the counterexamples built by openAI?

It seems you're fighting an hallucinated enemy.

[somenameforme]

One would think something like the study of the square root of negative 1 would have little utility beyond a hand-wavy appeal to understanding, but it turns out to have major practical applications ranging from electrical engineering to 3d rotations.

I tend to believe we're still likely at a very primitive level of technology. It's difficult to imagine this primarily because of unknown unknowns. For instance at the end of the 19th century it was believed that science had basically been finished, and all that remained was working things out to ever higher levels of precision to wrap up a few curiosities.

Then along come relativity, quantum mechanics, and more - all completely revolutionizing science, and upending centuries of false beliefs. I think we're far more likely to be at the end of the 19th century again, rather than at the end of science, or anywhere near such. And if that's the case, then it may well be that seemingly academic discoveries of today, perhaps ultimately achieved by an LLM, are what help unlock the next great revolution.

[aureate]

I shouldn't be surprised how prevalent this viewpoint is, given the entrenched anti-intellectualism these days in the US and across the world, but it's disturbing to see it so widespread on HN of all places.

You are of course free to wield this new technology any way you choose (to the extent its owners and your wallet allow you to, for now at least), and if you can enrich yourself by doing so power to you. I won't attempt to dissuade you from your apparent hatred of those who have spent their lives trying to expand the boundaries of human understanding. I'll just state my equally emotion-driven opposing view: It always was and always will be about the understanding. "Results" and "progress" without sufficient thought are the reason our enormous modern wealth is accompanied by so much human misery.

I don't relish the prospect of living in your predicted world of multiplying technology untempered by human thought, if that's what happens to emerge. I don't think it will be a good place for anyone but a handful of the very richest. Good luck adding yourself to their number.

[tentahedronic]

Once you have experienced first hand the level of disdain the so called intellectuels have towards the regular joe it is hard to feel any sympathy for them. If I can be replaced with cheap foreign labour you too should just deal with it. You are not entitled to your well paying oil drilling job, you know, you should just move on and take another job or two and some nightly backbreaking gigs here and there if math doesn't feed your family any more. Surely you don't want to be lazier than immigrants and can adjust to their frugal standards of living...

Exceptional mathematicians are not going to be jobless, just like master level craftsmen still do kinda well. Tough luck if your abilities are subpar to achieve excellence though, that is just the rat race to the bottom we have created and finally the so called intellectuels are also getting to fully taste it themselves. Realizing you were never that special and your job can be either fully automated away or reduced to a wage that barely pays the bills is a hard pill to swallow. But progress is inevitable as they have been saying.

I will keep studying math purely for fun.

[aureate]

I struggle to identify with the apparent glee you feel at berating the person you imagine yourself talking to. I guess we all have our own idiosyncratic forms of fantasy, but this one doesn't seem very healthy.

[akmarinov]

Same thing on coding - business doesn’t care one bit about your clean architecture or clever design, so long as the AI can change the implementation fast enough to ship whatever product comes up with.

People are having a rough time figuring out that good design and fundamentals no longer align with the business side of things.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

> business doesn’t care one bit about your clean architecture or clever design

Perhaps not in general, but this is nothing new or related to AI. For one thing software is a strangely private craft - your boss is likely only aware of what you are producing, not the craft or quality (or not) that went into it - the only ones aware of that would be co-workers who are looking at your source code, and perhaps choosing to use it or not. Secondly, the sad truth in business, not just for software developers is that there is a huge amount of truth in "its not what you know, it's who you know".

> People are having a rough time figuring out that good design and fundamentals no longer align with the business side of things.

The business may be unaware of what your code looks like, or the expertise that went into it to avoid bad production outcomes, but they surely DO care when poor quality software leads to production outages, and customer complaints, and their boss yelling at them as a result. The results of poor quality software will manifest in many ways, not just the poor reliability and performance of your latest release, but also the future outcomes of attempts to build on top of it.

I think it's extremely early to assess the impact of AI software quality and the ways it impacts businesses in these ways, such as production outages, that they do care about. There have certainly been well publicized cases such as AWS outages blamed on AI, but although it seems like an eternity it's only been ~6 months since AI really became usefully competent and capable of "vibe coding", so I think we're only just beginning to see the results.

Companies and bosses that have enthusiastically adopted AI are unlikely to point to AI and themselves if/when it proves to be detrimental (AWS were quick to deny it, despite the insider leaks to the contrary), so I'd not be surprised if it takes years rather than months for there to be much clarity on this.

FWIW, I think there is a considerable difference between math, which is what we're really discussing here, and software development, as far as how quickly it will or has fallen to AI. Math is really uniquely suited to LLMs and reinforcement learning of domain-specific reasoning since mathematical papers basically consist of nothing but reasoning, and it is an entirely theoretical field that essentially lives in the world of language (incl. mathematical notation) without any external grounding. Contrast to software development where what is available to train on is mostly the end result (code!) rather than the reasoning that got you there, and there is also a large "experimental" aspect - what happens in the real world when you run the produced artifact.

[bbg2401]

Even beyond the malady of feeling liberated by others struggling, all you’ve done is express poisonous anti-intellectualism.

[tentahedronic]

Anti-intellectualism is not worse than being against the actual working class (those stupid rednecks who don't even know what is best for them).

[dahart]

That’s pure straw man. There isn’t anyone against the working class in this thread, and there is anti-intellectualism in this thread. I don’t doubt there are some academics who are jerks, but you’re incorrectly assuming something about all academics (not to mention all working class) that simply isn’t true.

[QuesnayJr]

Your reply isn't a response to the comment, but rather a general expression of antipathy towards mathematicians, who are apparently fatcats who have fancy lifestyles.

OpenAI sat on the results so they could drop 10 at a time. It's rumored that they are sitting more results: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/513818/a-serious-challeng...

So not only are we not going to get boatloads of results, we're only get as many results as necessary for OpenAI to market their models.