I like the pragmatic take on AI in mathematics. Running off and proving/formalizing things in incomprehensible ways is marginally useful, and probably harmful for any work that needs to move beyond it. But, there's value in what AI is capable of doing for working mathematicians, when used as a partner.

The genie is out of the bottle though. It's hard to see how there won't be weird and inscrutable branches of mathematics that LLMs build and use effectively _for themselves_, in the same way much of the slop LLMs write in spoken language is really for the consumption of LLMs.

Surely there will be a new kind of research mathematician that's investigating this output in the same way, say, academics in literature read.

▲

contubernio an hour ago | parent | next [-]

We research mathematicians are still learning how to use AI in research and how to deal with the output. I drafted eight papers last weekend. This week I advanced on none. AI still gets stuck at the key point on a problem where there isn't already a lot of work done. What falls is where techniques not known to the researcher are available and profitably employed - ai brings them into the fray fast - and someone with experience immediately sees where to go with it - and the dominos fall.

So far AI still doesn't make definitions. It tries but it doesn't really see structure - only patterns on which it can impose (by brute force) known structures.

What's not clear is how the professional infrastructure will survive. Journals seem likely to die. The arxiv is swamped. A human can't assess the volume of the output. Serious conjectures have fallen and serious people have checked them.

We are looking for constructive and productive and socially useful ways forward. One reflection is that a lot of what we have been doing was maybe not so interesting as we thought.

	▲	transitorykris 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Only a minor in mathematics here. That's interesting that it struggles with definitions. Maybe unsurprising given the different ways they're chosen and written (motivational, aesthetic, pedagogical, etc)? A big lever to keep hold of.

▲

shiandow 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> in the same way much of the slop LLMs write in spoken language is really for the consumption of LLMs.

Is it though? We're not benchmarking how well LLMs 'like' it, and slop is characterised by an unnatural absence of useful information.

It seems mostly designed to mislead humans into believing it was written by someone knowledgeable on the subject.