Why not use some of the money to develop open-weight, open-training-pipeline, fully introspectable and hackable LLM-based theorem proving assistants? Make them a commodity in every mathematician's office like other computational tools. Such a project would itself yield research topics.

> A non-zero amount of it is probably going directly to the AI companies through tokens...

Much the same way that VC money has been funnelled to Google and Meta through advertising budgets.

Isn’t the very pitch ai bros have to their investors: “we’ll replace ppl by tokens.”

If it doesn’t pay for non-permanent staff salary that would be sad for the maths ppl indeed.

OTOH I have a phd in th physics, 15+ y of academic senior researcher experience, now working 60+ h /w on an unpaid internship and using lunch money to pay for tokens.

And I’m by far not most unlucky

Edit: just to put things in perspective, my phd field (string theory) has 15-30M€ annual funding in Europe (per google)

While the contributing AI companies certainly have a lingering conflict of interest, the relevant point is the effort find a constructive way to live with the reality of AI?

Mathematicians are in the same boat as Silicon Valley programmers in the end: AI is doing their job better than them and cheaper. Other professions will join shortly.

The question then becomes, what do humans do? Resigning to die quietly is hardly the most favorable option?

Just because somebody else can do something better than you ever could doesn't make doing it superfluous. There is more to mathematics and software engineering than finding proofs and algorithms.

Terrence Tao can't decide to keep the money and pay himself more or something though. He _has_ to spend it

Do you consider yourself to be necessary? Like, for mankind? Probably not: you're just one of eight billion nearly-identical people, and if you vanish off the surface of the planet, the economic loss will be basically zero. Heck, if you're of retirement age, you're probably a net burden for the society.

But that doesn't sound like a good argument to ride off into the sunset, right? You probably enjoy living and it does make a difference in the lives of some close friends and relatives?

We don't organize societies around ruthless efficiency optimization, we organize them to be at least somewhat hospitable to humans and human enterprise.