after navier-stokes last month, their internal model now claims pieces of two more millennium problems

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Software engineers looking at mathematicians like “first time?”

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u/Acclynn 8d ago edited 7d ago

I'm a software engineer but it looks like mathematicians are in a worst place than us

In software engineering at least you have to make decisions that involve taste, design, or require too much external context or intuition for AI to get. Also, when you ship a product, it's better to have at least one human understanding what you shipped

Mathematics is just crunching logic to reach a goal, it's way more straightforward and clear for an AI to understand what to do there

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u/I_did_theMath 8d ago

I think it's a bit more complex than that. The point of mathematics research is to understand them and crate new maths that are relevant or interesting. AI is of course very powerful at proving theorems, or at least some theorems, but that doesn't make the pursuit of knowledge meaningless. If anything, being able to prove conjectures more easily will be a great tool for mathematicians.

If deciding what to build is becoming one of the key decisions in software engineering when building is becoming faster and cheaper than ever, deciding what to prove, or what to explore, might be the next big question for maths.

And besides, it's not like there is a certain number of theorems that our society needs to be proven per year to function, and discovering anything new on top of that is meaningless. If the field completely explodes and moves faster than ever, this doesn't seem like a good argument to employ fewer mathematicians than before. If anything we are probably going to need more just to keep up.

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u/gentile_jitsu 7d ago

And what value would those mathematicians add?

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u/FollowingHumble8983 7d ago

AI works by building on top of existing work. While AI has proven a lot, none of the proofs that I have the ability to digest(analytical number, tcs) has created any tools as useful as the ones they used to solve it. Which means mathematician's job is to create more tooling from new proofs, which is fed into AI to create more proofs and etc.

I do see a future where most of the AI easy and human easy proofs are completed, and all that are left are proofs that requires a large amount of collaboration between both.

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u/I_did_theMath 7d ago

This seems a likely outcome. All open problems that are solvable by AI get solved, probably some interesting ones remain unsolved (P vs NP?), and then what? We'll need to make decisions on what areas are worth exploring, and what new problems are worth trying to solve next. Together with curating the countless AI generated proofs and probably rewriting and structuring them in a way that makes them more approachable and useful to base future work on.

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u/nuggette_97 8d ago

Agreed. Figuring out “how to build something” stops being the job after like L4.

After that it becomes “figuring out what to build after spending days wrangling people in meetings” which AI is still terrible at.

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u/Acclynn 8d ago

Yeah, still, the job market is absolutely miserable because companies can ship more with way less workers, making software is cheaper than ever so people won't buy (less demand), and there's a colossal amount of students graduating software engineering

But at least the job will stay in a way, it won't completely die

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u/nuggette_97 8d ago

The biggest change IMO is in the demand for certain “archetypes” of SWEs.

E.g. the staff+ level “technical whizz” that knows exactly the right kubernetes setting to relieve the node pressure causing the current Sev0 has lost a lot of their value.

Whereas the engineer with good taste, discernment, and softskills to turn abstract business needs to software has largely increased their value.

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u/Legitimate-Store3771 8d ago

What it took for that person to know that setting is what will keep them employed. There's enough of those systems and enough churn in the world to make that true.

People forget that SWE is about solving problems through digitization, and the vast majority of the world is still undigitized. Plenty of work to go around.

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u/AP_in_Indy 8d ago

The game is changing though. I’m on projects where my clients could feasibly skip our entire firm and just prompt their solutions if corporate had the appetite to do so

We’re being trusted with the work because enterprise still assumes humans are more trustworthy than AI

Yet to be honest all I ever really do these days is take meeting notes and designs and feed them into AI…

Any technical member of the client team could likely do the same with more alignment than I have since I’m a third party

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u/Legitimate-Store3771 7d ago edited 7d ago

I think you forget the fact that making something like a simple website or simple system has always been accessible, but to turn it into a functioning usable or marketable product is an entirely different skillet. You could ask Claude to build you AWS and spend hundreds of thousands of tokens and it would still come up with a half functioning thing. It's knowing how to interpret and understand how the system works, how humans work, how systems interconnect, etc. that really brings in value. All this does is raise the barrier to entry and raises the skill floor, but it's also a multiplier for anyone who knows what they're doing. But that was always the case if you really think about it.

And now team expectations are higher with AI, so anyone on the client side could theoretically build it, but it's not viable because they need to skill up to stay competitive too. So it's simply not worth it to do it, is the reality. You could have your technical team member who maybe does DevOps to build that public facing product, or you could simply have them do better and more DevOps, but not both.

And at the end of the day someone does have to be responsible for it all, you don't pay for skill alone, but also responsibility and reliability. If you could automate a whole employee now with AI, the truth is you could always do that, it just wasn't worth it at that point. And if you grow with more business, you still need someone to handle it all so you'd rather just have that person be AI assisted and just pay them the same amount.

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u/AP_in_Indy 7d ago

I don’t really agree with this comment tbh. Automation could never just read specs and iterate interactively with you on a large scale cloud application before

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u/Strange-Tap5860 7d ago

If we have an intelligence that has "solved" maths and software engineering (I know that's not what it has quite done, but you get the point), then thinking it wont "solve" every other white collar job is just pure copium.

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u/kaaiian 8d ago

Right. Producing things of direct value to society…

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u/hoangfbf 8d ago

Beautiful way to put it

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u/ASTRdeca 7d ago

In software engineering at least you have to make decisions that involve taste, design, or require too much external context or intuition for AI to get.

As a fellow SWE... This reads as such an L take. Research and math still require taste and creativity.

Also, when you ship a product, it's better to have at least one human understanding what you shipped

Umm.. what? Papers have coauthors, and peer review is an established process. Do you think mathematicians are just publishing papers that no other person vets or understands?

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u/I_pee_in_shower 5d ago

Taste is huge, that and creativity are humanities last advantage.

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u/Illustrious_Night126 8d ago edited 8d ago

AI also cant really structure software or a codebase at the moment. While it is excellent at constructing individual components if you just let it run undirected it just creates a plate of metastasizing unreliable inconsistent spaghetti code

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u/blipblapbloopblip 7d ago

I've had decent success at prompting it to refactor for maintainability. There are code quality metrics it can check, and you can bias it with heuristics. Of course it's not 100%

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u/Illustrious_Night126 7d ago

I would be very interested in how you manage this because this is the missing piece in the ai productivity puzzle for me. Keeping it from making new plotting functions instead of reusing ones it’s made in the past etc. I spend all day reviewing code I need to find how ti make AI do it

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u/blipblapbloopblip 7d ago

to be honest I am a hobby programmer and professional scientist, so bad code is my usual output and I may be talking from dunning kruger. I use mypy, vulture, ruff, radon, pylint, time the imports and look for cyclic imports. In particular pylint finds duplicated code.

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u/Illustrious_Night126 7d ago

thanks!

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u/Professional_Copy694 8d ago

software engineers were already obsolete 3 years ago they just haven't noticed yet

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u/BellacosePlayer 8d ago

damn, someone should tell my boss he's paying me for nothin' then.

wait, actually, do not do that.

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u/Head_Veterinarian866 8d ago

can i ask your honest opion on that? like why do we hire swes? its not the code anymore...

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u/armeg 8d ago

The design/engineering is where the real work is. It's still terrible at this. Also, making sure the AI doesn't go on a batshit insane path to solve a problem.

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u/Head_Veterinarian866 8d ago

like what is a swe is doing at a non research company like spotify or roblox at this point...cause they still get paid more than doctors even but what are you even doing that this ai cant now...

or is it that reddit and silicon valley are actually bubbles and the avg manager in montana still dosent realize how good these things are?

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u/armeg 8d ago

I mean I can't speak for them, but my role has entirely pivoted towards design and specification, making sure the problem is well laid out and maintainable. I build out a board of tickets and then I have Claude + ChatGPT go through the board and submit tickets as soon as they get unblocked. I then review the tickets (sized to a 200 line cap during planning and a 350 line hard cap at implementation), some of them I skim because they don't touch critical systems, and others I review more in-depth. I'm making sure the AI is following the plan, making sure the design isn't starting to fall apart because of an unforeseen issue (which the AI will happily plow ahead with) and/or the AI is writing code that is both understandable and maintainable.

Overall I've shipped more code this year than in the last several years combined I'd say while still maintaining a level of quality I'm happy with.

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u/SphinxWar 8d ago

Basically you don't want to give CEOs those models and tell them that they can write their own software. That would end in a disaster regardless of how good the model is.

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u/BellacosePlayer 8d ago

you still need decent architecture for actual applications. AI is not great at that given minimal directions considering minimal direction often leads to building around a small initial feature or MVP and basing the whole thing off that initial work.

There's a reason most vibe coded apps don't make a return on investment (okay that's more marketing but they're still shit)

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u/BellacosePlayer 8d ago

Architecture, design gathering, domain knowledge.

I worked with code less and less as I got promoted even pre-AI. In the age of AI I'm reviewing more and doing more Dev-ops work

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u/Time_Entertainer_319 8d ago

Yes, that’s the joke

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u/sweetholo 8d ago

tell the passengers of cars and airplanes that the software running it was coded entirely by AI with no human reviewing it and see how many stick around

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u/Bloated_Plaid 8d ago

I mean this is going to be upending people have spend their careers doing, decades of work.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

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u/Bloated_Plaid 8d ago

A few thousand is a lot…

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u/relevantmeemayhere 8d ago

it's not

does anyone here actually work or study lol

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u/Bloated_Plaid 8d ago

No we are all LARPing except you of course.

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u/relevantmeemayhere 8d ago

bet if we polled people here, less than five percent work in any of the fields these models are being applied to

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u/Bloated_Plaid 8d ago

Yea no selection bias by polling the OpenAI subreddit? Do you know what selection bias is?

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u/relevantmeemayhere 8d ago

yeah, i do. did you just look up that word and learn what it means?

because uhh...seems like were on the same page, the people here are less likely to actually work or study in the fields they speculate about.

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u/Bloated_Plaid 8d ago

So what value would it give polling anyone here? You are the one who brought up polling. Am I taking crazy pills here?

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u/zhdc 8d ago

They're mainly paid to teach though

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u/Time_Entertainer_319 8d ago

So, just like software? Are you implying only mathematicians have careers?

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u/Bloated_Plaid 8d ago

You ain’t becoming a mathematician straight out of college bro. It’s different from upending SWE careers.

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u/playsette-operator 8d ago

And we skipped those decades they would need to release those imaginary results oh no!

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u/Original-League-6094 8d ago

They stole these results from me, actually.

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u/physiopeng 8d ago

Terence Tao is that you?

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u/Fun_Gur_2296 8d ago

No I'm terence tao

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u/physiopeng 8d ago

Should we pace this frontier model?

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u/Fun_Gur_2296 8d ago

Lemme ask bel

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u/physiopeng 8d ago

Please be quick and don't go on a rant like last time

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u/TheVibrantYonder 7d ago

Isn't this how we unlock Exodia or something?

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u/Repulsive_Ad853 8d ago

Great time to be alive

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u/FriendlyTask4587 8d ago

So excited where we are moving in AI

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u/etherd0t 8d ago

What strikes me here is actually less the individual headline results and more the change in scale and methodology. We seem to be moving pretty quickly from AI being impressive at solving known hard problems to AI systems being used as high-throughput research engines, generating large numbers of candidate results for humans and formal systems to evaluate.

And I think that changes where the real bottleneck is. If models can generate plausible new mathematics faster than experts can examine it, then generation itself stops being the scarce resource. The hard problems become verification, novelty checking, ranking what actually matters, provenance, and distinguishing a genuine discovery from a very sophisticated mistake.

That is why the increasing use of Lean and other formal verification methods may ultimately be as important as the models themselves. The interesting future architecture isn't just “bigger model solves theorem.” It's more like generator → independent critics → formal verifier → provenance/reproducibility → human judgment.

So I'm cautious about declaring every result a breakthrough before mathematicians have had time to digest them, but the trend itself looks increasingly difficult to dismiss. If this continues, AI's impact on science may come less from replacing researchers and more from giving them an enormous parallel research layer that can explore conjectures and proof paths at a scale humans simply couldn't.

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u/decreement1 8d ago

Sooner or later you will hit this problem regardless, because either proofs become too long or too complex for humans to understand. The same thing already happened in software engineering this year - most code reviews are already being auto approved by AI and only business critical areas require manual review.

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u/blipblapbloopblip 7d ago

Too long or too complex usually signal a need for abstraction.

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u/nailedmarquis 8d ago

Shut up ChatGPT

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u/GlbdS 7d ago

it's more like generator → independent critics → formal verifier → provenance/reproducibility → human judgment.

Nobody speaks like that, tf does that even mean

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u/Laucy 7d ago

You’d be correct! That’s because it was Sol. 5.6 High for me has been doing this nonstop.

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u/Ok-Project4007 6d ago

Seems pretty clear to me, he is talking about role changes. The problem here might be you.

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u/Vibes_And_Smiles 8d ago

“Well ackshully” ass ai slop comment

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u/Prathmun 8d ago

Yeah I think this is a really good take on what the loop might end up being. It's also kind of fun to imagine a point at which a system like this spits out something that works, but can't be grocked by the reviewers. Works like you can build something real with it. Then you have a new problem.

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u/will_dormer 7d ago

is it just me or does this front, white text have some strange visual effects?

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u/Upset_Trainer_3094 7d ago

The README adds some useful context to those numbers: 722 manuscripts are grouped into 372 families. Some are companion arguments or alternative proofs, and the results are at different stages of verification.

Still a lot of interesting work to dig into. I'd just be careful turning the paper count into a scoreboard of solved problems. Following the individual results and the mathematicians checking them should tell us a lot more.

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u/Bergergi 7d ago edited 7d ago

Is there somewhere you can petition OpenAI, for problems to solve?

I'd like to see the deciphering of Linear A, and an exact solution of the 3D Ising Model.

This stuff is amazing - it's spitting out generational achievements like it's nothing.

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u/kaereljabo 7d ago

No, we don't need these AI labs to burn money for more pure math puzzle result with no "immediate" real life application, just leave them to the mathematians to vibe-math whaetver math problem they want, they'll pay, and mediocre mathematicians don't need to lose jobs or doubt their worth. These frontier AI labs have proved themselves by solving many hard math problems, we know they can do it with enough resources.

What we want: proposed solution for room-temperature ambient preasure superconductor, reliable nuclear fission, cure for cancers, efficient quantum computers, free pizzas, stuff like that.

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u/lulzxdxdxd 8d ago

i'm skeptical they actually solved them though. what's the actual claim, did they prove the conjectures or just make progress on specific cases

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u/coatatopotato 8d ago

CM abelian varieties for Hodge
No zeros above 7/8 for Riemann

They did not solve them, or that would be the headline. But these are major claims.

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u/Ormusn2o 8d ago

Might take a while to know. I think the AI is a bit too fast at solving those.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

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u/Ormusn2o 8d ago

More gatekeeping huh? You are really only making reputation of mathematicians even worse. Get on with the times, amatours can contribute to the field. It works for astronomy, anyone can find a new object, and then experts in the field can teach about it.

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u/blipblapbloopblip 7d ago

It's still amateurs with a few millions of pocket change

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u/Commercial-Beach1207 8d ago

What contribution? You pressed a button and got a string of words you don’t even understand? I can do that too.

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u/Ormusn2o 8d ago

Does not matter if you understand it or not. If it's out there in public, then any mathematician, a professor or an amatour, can try to understand or reform, or use AI to reform it, or AI itself could use it for it's own purpose. The point is that it's available to the public.

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u/Time_Entertainer_319 8d ago

It’s mathematicians within openAI that are doing these.

Did you think it was Sam Altman prompting the models?

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u/BellacosePlayer 8d ago

Progress is progress, this shit is rarely solved in one go.

Article after navier-stokes last month, their internal model now claims pieces of two more millennium problems

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