The problem isn't just that the papers aren't fun to read. The problem is that a lot of the research that goes into solving these issues leads to other discovers, new fields to explore and people have to develop new approaches to solve them. The other part of it is, the quality and the enjoyment of working on these problems leads people to find new and other interest problems to work on.

If you just strip mine the answers and Sam Altmans magic button solves 100/100 problems, what's next? Who is left to come up with a new interesting question for the magic button to solve?

Lastly, life and the present moment is all there is, if there is no enjoyment in anything we do, then what's the point of all the "living for ever" Altman et al want to achieve.

We will live forever to read boring papers generated by LLMs? Literally sounds like an eternal hell.

People are already finding stuff in the release to get excited about, and as the models get better at distilling proofs to make them more coherent, this will only amplify. Of all the things to worry about, human curiosity and the ability to run with new ideas probably aren't at stake.

In fact, I can't remember a time when I was more excited about the future of science. This could herald an end to the replication crisis, and kill off bullshit science completely. The danger of course is that we end up with two companies effectively dominating cutting edge research in every field, but it remains to be seen if that's even possible given the pace of improvement in open weight models.

Nuclear fusion is already proven by the universe to be a viable energy source by the fact that the sun exists but people still work on understanding and taking it and developing new approaches to accomplish it. People didn't stop experimenting with and developing programming languages because technically they're all turning complete and the first one was "enough." Y'all will be fine - every JavaScript framework that exists is someone looking at a theoretically correct and complete solution and deciding actually it sucks and they could do better. "I want to understand xyz but the proof is trash and I think it's ugly" will be plenty motivation for a lot of people to work on it.

Here's a guy who's made a "beyond n log n" tracker: https://x.com/aurel_pr/status/2108214135179944096

He's tracking the community progress on sub-n log n multiplication. OpenAI started with 1 - 1.63e-55. The result has been now improved on 115 times, and the current record is "rohanarun"'s 1 - 9.87e-5. I'm sure by tomorrow it'll have improved again.

Does this look like people aren't having fun? Does it look like they aren't discovering stuff? It looks like it's spurred a cascade of interesting community activity. It doesn't really seem much different from what happened with the twin primes conjecture. Isn't that supposed to be the point of all this?