It really pains me to read the responses here to this and the AHM statements. It feels like HN people here are talking with such... privilege. These are the smartest people on the planet saying "hey, please don't do this, it's seriously hampering our work in this field". And then people on here say that mathematicians are... gate keeping? Not embracing progress? Who are you to say that? How do you know? What happened to empathy for others? I don't understand you all...

Part of it is probably because we've already been through this? The SWE field has seen exactly these reactions over the past 4+ years.

Some people saw "the spark" before LLMs were mainstream. We had code autocomplete models based on GPT2 that ran on your machine and provided line-based autocomplete. Then we had gpt3.5 (chatgpt launch) where it almost looked like it could write python, then we had gpt4 and saw the first glimpses of actual code writing, then opus4 / gpt5, and today we have sol/fable etc. At every step we had people in this field write the same kinds of takes. And at every step the tech evolved, improved, and got better. To a point where the vast majority learned to accept it, and the denialists (there are still some) are now in a minority.

And the acceptance phase was not "we are now useless as SWE", nor was it "hah, it's only for the juniors, we are safe. It was, mainly, "we can now work at a higher level of abstraction, and use our experience to guide these tools and work faster / broader / deeper in a topic. Basically understand the tools, learn their pros and cons, and adapt at using them.

Also part of it could be that the message seems to complain about the situation without providing alternatives. What are the alternatives? What are they proposing? "Please don't do this" does seem like gate keeping if you don't offer an alternative. What exactly do they want these labs to do? Don't try to solve the problems? (stop the count?) Don't publish the results? It's not clear to me.

I guess a lot of people are unclear on the messaging. Is this purely ideological, or is it something more? (It doesn't help that AHM also has a section where they highlight their members who pledge to do research "without AI assistance". Whatever that means. Yeah, that's cute, but can signal denial, which again we've already seen in SWE, and hopefully most people have dismissed it already) Are these statements part of the 7 stages of grief, or is there more? When taken at face value, the statements seem rushed, unprepared and "in denial". At least when compared to writing on the same topic from other people in the field (Tao et all).

> "hey, please don't do this, it's seriously hampering our work in this field"

I don't think that that's really a fair summary of the linked article though. By my reading, I'd say that a quarter of the responses were overall positive on the announcement, a quarter were overall negative, and the rest were mixed/neutral. I agree that there are many mathematicians saying something similar to "please don't do this", but that's not a consensus (or even a plurality) view.

(I agree with your broader point though, that lots of the other replies to this article are way too dismissive of mathematicians' concerns.)

OpenAI dropped a slop bomb on mathematics the same way people will drop slop bombs in codebases and the people here are saying “well drop everything and review it of course!”

I think it’s very reasonable to expect the people that are dropping this on other people for review to have reviewed it first, closely, made adjustments, etc, the same way I do before dumping my Claude/ChatGPT assisted PRs onto other people.

The reviewers shouldn’t be exerting more effort than the person that set the prompt.

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