i think to certain types of people (who are probably more likely to be mathematicians), the "self" discovery aspect of it is important, they don't want to read about a new proof for a problem they were grappling with, they want to come about it through their own thoughts.

> Until we can demonstrate AI consciousness, “seeing the raw truth” will be a human activity.

I don't think this matters a bit. We individually can't demonstrate "consciousness" in other humans, it's not even a word with a definition. What we can do is miss the feeling of discovering something on one's own rather than having it explained to you over and over again until you understand it.

I mean, dead mathematicians are definitely not "conscious," but their books keep you from discovering things that you may have discovered yourself if left to your own devices.

The joy that was mentioned is the joy of knowing a bit of gossip that no one else knows, of being the first explainer. Interpretation is just being able to pass gossip on; a decidedly lesser joy. And there's no reason that AI shouldn't be able to explain findings in an intuitive way - LLMs at least purely operate based on human intuition as written in human communications and then captured in matrices.

If these proofs are good (doubtful, imo) and can be reduced (intuitively distilled, sorry), there's no reason that an LLM shouldn't be able to do that.

Climbing a mountain is different from flying a helicopter to the top

Most of these questions Mathematicians posed to each other have no practical application, and probably will never have a practical application. (ex: the solution to the Navier Stokes question doesn't change anything at all.)

In many ways, the teleporting machine that teleports to the solution is against the point of the questions. No one wants the solution to be "Run $10,000,000 worth of tokens to cover all possible Lean formulations of the problem".

I think for Mathematicians, I'd say that the human level formulation is still possible and with a new perspective. We as a society (and outside of Mathematics) need to also understand that this AI teleport to the answer thing has less value than we all expected. The value is in the journey.

The open question is if people will still want to take the journey if the teleport machine exists. Or if the existence of the teleport machine halts exploration.

As someone with friends in the mathematics community, they've expressed similar sentiments.

I have to wonder if this is the equivalent of teleporting back in time and finding Marco Polo or any of those early explorers who traveled for the love of the game (and fame and money), and opening up Google Maps on your phone and showing them the zoomed out world. And showing them any island or village they could name.

This is absurd and silly. Discovery doesn't go away because more new things are being discovered. This position only makes sense if you make an arbitrary cut point where some instances "don't count". If you were to go back to scientists or mathematicians several hundred years ago and tell them that one day science would be done by tens of millions of full time researchers around the globe, often working in teams, some of them might also bemoan the loss of the "hero scientist" as any commoner could now participate. But science and math have only benefited from this, and this has increased, not decreased, the beauty and wonder in these fields.

That's the issue - trial and error. A human can try a couple ideas in a day, but realistically, there are not that many sane ideas.

Computer can iterate without frustration on a completely random garbage. Once in a while it stumbles upon a gem. Even if it's one in 10000, that's still hundreds of good ideas in a day (provided enough GPUs).