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arjie 3 hours ago

Woah, guys, the article is actually super cool. I almost didn't read the article because of the AI thing - I follow him on the microblog networks and I know he's pretty good at using LLMs and so on so that's not interesting. The unique stuff about him and gowers that it points out is there idea for massively parallelizable mathematics problem solving. It's definitely worth a read for how they got the first Polymath publication and afterwards for how they want to use LLMs et al. to do this:

> He predicted that in the future, instead of working alone or in small teams of two or three, mathematicians might work on projects with hundreds of other people at a time. And when these collaborations were over, he said — in his modest, understated way — the results might be checked not by human referees but by computers.

Fascinating stuff. My thought has always been that the AI will accelerate individuals and we'll get something like the economy for music or sports (the top few take almost all the revenue) but this may seem like an alternative pathway that might well develop (if only in Mathematics there) where AI systems drop the coordination cost to near zero by making checking cheap.

So far, and I am not foolish enough to say forever, agents are great at operating in the space of checkables and it's hard to get uniqueness out of them (I haven't succeeded in getting a real laugh from Fable) but perhaps there's a whole class of problems that we can now solve by turning humans into the search units. I love it!