Just the other day I was thinking, if unsupervised maths will descend into "oops we found a bug in some code, branch XYZ of maths is no longer true".

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literalAardvark 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you go far enough to the edge that's already how math works, since everything is very interpretation-sensitive.

There is however a new problem of scale. Erdös was a human and still managed to create work for an entire generation of mathematicians, how much of a mess will an automathician create?

	▲	doginasuit 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> automathician I vote for "automathon"

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jjgreen 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

c.f. Italian differential geometry

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karmakurtisaani 11 hours ago | parent [-]

*Algebraic geometry

	▲	jjgreen 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		ha, of course -- in my defence I'm an analyst, all geometry looks the same to me ...

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rapsey 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure but if the results have practical implications then the validity will be self evident. If they do not, not much of consequence has been lost.

Interesting that math gets so much attention, when actual advances to material science, biology and chemistry have much higher ramifications and economic benefits. I assume progress there is kept under wraps until they can capture the economic benefits. If they can do that, then the insane valuations may actually be valid.

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plastic-enjoyer 12 hours ago | parent [-]

> I assume progress there is kept under wraps until they can capture the economic benefits. If they can do that, then the insane valuations may actually be valid.

Or progress is not as straight forward in those fields as in math.

	▲	magimas 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		that's my experience (at least for experimental quantum materials research). LLMs help a lot with paper discovery, grant/paper writing etc., but on the experimental side, they barely move the needle for now. Some analyses are done faster now than they were before because you don't need to fiddle around with the code, but that's it. In a field where a single person can maybe produce and characterize a single sample per day, AI will only really start speeding up progress once you combine it with robotics.