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▲ anonymous908213 an hour ago

This is my hypothesis too. I work with LLMs daily. I use frontier models all the time, and I work in a startup that trains its own special-purpose models. At no point in the course of my work do I see anything resembling superhuman intelligence. I see superhuman stupidity, ie. stupidity so extreme that it exceeds what any human is capable of by orders of magnitude. So where are the superhuman math results coming from? Simple: translation. I've already thought this for a long time, that math is an obsfucated field and that programming already makes it far simpler to understand. So you train a machine to throw tons of compute at translating math into programming, and blow the field out of the water because it's effectively been deobfuscated. Math proofs had a sort of security by obscurity; they were not genuinely supremely difficult, but rather very few people worldwide worked on them and their work was heavily obscured, so the great deobfuscation machine comes along and trivialises that aspect and suddenly the facade crumbles. I think all of this could have been achieved a long time ago had humans done the deobfuscation, but there wasn't sufficient programming <--> maths cross-domain expertise or financial incentive to develop it.