Post #4103451

It is surprising how many exceptionally strong mathematicians have started working for OpenAI and Anthropic. These people would have easily become professors at top universities if they stayed in academia. I think many mathematicians, especially the competitive ones at the top, have a “progress at any cost” attitude (and I’m sure the paychecks helped). As for the results, you still need good mathematicians to sift through all the output to identify that the proofs are valid. I would honestly be positive about universities developing their own AI to help mathematicians get these kinds of results, but right now, AI is inseparable from these evil companies. Thankfully, I believe this is a likely outcome in the future because the AI companies will one day implode. From what I’ve seen, most prompts are in plain English. I suppose the part where the AI parses the statement correctly is much easier than the part where it boils a couple lakes in the process of bashing its head against the wall trying millions of different combinations of random shit from the literature to slap together a proof. For one of the big results (cycle double cover), the prompt specified that the AI could use 64 subagents and was required to not give up for at least 8 hours. The tokenmaxxers would be proud, we didn’t need that forest anyway. Thank god math doesn’t have a CTO to look at the expense reports.