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▲ reasonableklout 5 hours ago

This post in the blog comments is quite compelling. Some observations that publishing of research is drying up because results can be easily retrieved at any time. Over the long-term, I wonder whether this will result in accumulation of knowledge grinding to a halt:

> With the latest ChatGPT models, these problems are more equivalent to homework questions: the answer is `in the back of the book.’ I am not discovering new solutions. Instead, I am working on problems whose answer exists and is simply waiting to be retrieved by a user of the model. In fact, I mentioned a problem that I was interested in working on to my advisor and he informed me that he and a collaborator had completely resolved it using ChatGPT – they have no plans to write up the result, so it will sit there until another `researcher’ pulls the proof slot machine.

There is another good point that the most tenured researchers have a sense of what problems are most worth exploring and therefore are more likely to feel excitement than younger researchers:

> I have also heard the contention that math research has `gotten more exciting,’ mainly from established researchers. They have decades of open problems that they care deeply about and want to see resolved. I have no such problems.