Post #4068501

2026-07-24 17:25 UTC

I just entered university for math and even though this is all very demotivating, it’s just what I’m good at. math.andrej.com/…/how-to-review-formalized-mathem… The AI people’s cry of "no don’t look at the code! it’s in lean so it’s correct! does give me a bit of hope (hi bitofhope if you’re here) that it’s bullshit that will fall over

Replies (1)

@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-07-24 18:47

I think a serious possibility is that AI generated papers flood the zone with uninteresting incremental results that are eventually meaningless and full of mistakes. Right now, math is full of smart, dedicated people, so at least major results are reviewed carefully. But as AI alarmism drives away many honest people from the field, the remaining mathematicians will be burdened with far more work to review, and their cognitive faculties will be eroded by LLM use. Despite 4 years of development, $3 trillion of debt, mountains of stolen data, all the agents and harnesses and loops and other expensive tricks, as well as the advantages of Lean in math research, LLMs still hallucinate. I believe this is happening with software, but at least there are objective consequences for screwing up there (guy gets his home directory deleted, email is sent on a guy’s behalf without permission, small business gets every customer subscription cancelled). But nothing bad happens if there is a mathematical mistake in a paper and nobody catches it. One could say to just provide a Lean proof, but there is still the issue of making sure the Lean code actually matches the content of the paper. Exactly what force will correct things? Still, I don’t think this is the most likely possibility. The AI companies are extremely unsustainable financially, and it’s not like they’re very popular. Once they collapse, I believe there will be a re-evaluation of how LLMs should be used in research. If they are used (let alone trained), someone is going to have to pay the bills. In the end, we have to ask ourselves the question of why one does math. To me, math is not really a field where you memorize trivia. The real value comes from being able to think abstractly and rigorously from first principles, and from understanding why something is true rather than just knowing it is true. It is another aspect of your ability to reason as a free human. A few dedicated people go into math research, but your skills can easily go to many places. If you’re starting undergrad, you have plenty of time to see how this all pans out before making a decision.

Open ##4069931