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 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	rubikscube09 42 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Eh, mathematicians themselves have started embracing it. Terence Tao talks about how LLMs will be on the frontlines, proving new results and humans will just be there to digest and explain them (if the LLMs don't end up being able to do that as well). It's valuable work but not what I really signed up for.

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skybrian 2 hours 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 2 hours 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

	▲	rubikscube09 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Don't really see much of a reason to keep going. LLMs basically have the whole mathematical corpus internalized, and can just practice endlessly through RL self play and autoformalization. Don't really see what my role would be in such a process other than passive appreciation and digestion.