Academics have completely lost it. The number of mathematicians who write with LLMs and are rationalizing their usage is frightening.

And they have the audacity to claim that the public will defund them if they don't use new tech. No, the public will defund you if you continue cheating like a 10 year old and you are evidently superfluous.

Just say no!

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rubikscube09 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

PhD student in math here. Doing LLM math is soulless and takes most of the fun out of solving difficult problems (for the most part - my opinion only, I'm happy to talk to mathematicians who like this kind of work). But ultimately the public funds us to produce and understand as many mathematical results as possible for downstream use (if you ask OpenAI/Anthropic, to cure cancer). In that case it doesn't matter who figures a result whether it be a human, LLM, or dog.

So what are we to do? Follow our duty to the community and the public, which is to produce as many results as possible? Or to follow our duty to ourselves and enjoy and understand what we are doing? To someone like me those things seem to be incorrigably opposed to each other now. At this pint the only option is to quit and find a new domain where human input in problem solving is still necessary.

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12989575 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would suggest that hardly anyone in the public is asking you to increase efficiency. That is the argument you read on pro-AI VC forums and Reddit.

In other words, it is a made-up argument. I think some mathematicians are either addicted (Feynman disease) or hope to make a breakthrough and somehow get credit. So they use "the public" to justify their habit.

The real public that is not on these forums wants academic freedom and independence from corporations. Both will suffer if you are entering soulless production pipelines.

	▲	clickety_clack 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The “real public” wants math to advance so that we can reap the benefits. We don’t care what tools you are or are not using, grant money will go to whichever group is making more progress.

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skybrian an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I suspect that the mathematicians who adapt best to AI will treat it like astronomers treat a telescope, as a source of possibly-interesting data to be analyzed. Maybe it looks like finished output, but that doesn’t mean it’s ready to show.

	▲	rubikscube09 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, this is in agreement with some people's view that math will become an empirical science. Basically humans probing/mining the brain of an LLM.

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mistrial9 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

please do not quit

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idont363 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

“Cheating”? I expect academics to pursue objective excellence in whatever shape or form it comes and not just the artisanal handwritten medieval nonsense shape.

Stop crying and start producing. The time to talk was five years ago. Everyone is way, way too tardy to the party.

It’s the same with developers: oh, but everything will collapse and nothing will work right without us manually signing off on this divinely ordained logic. Well, guess what? Nothing happened and things actually improved. Take a good hard look at software dev over the last ten years and tell me it was fine.

I am not at all convinced the current gen professionals are getting us to where we need to go.

	▲	qw21238 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
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