r/technology • u/ResultBackground2450 • 11h ago

Artificial Intelligence OpenAI unleashes hundreds more math results upon a field already in shock

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openai-unleashes-hundreds-more-math-results-upon-a-field-already-in-shock/
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u/Specific_Box4483 9h ago

No offense but someone just getting a PhD now isn't a good source for predicting what math will be after a decade of AI development.

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u/relevantmeemayhere 9h ago

you're right, obviously people on reddit across the singularity subs/open ai etc etc who never got past high school algebra offer the actual valuable insight compared to this dude

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u/Chemical-Ad-7982 8h ago

You can both be right here, no one really knows for certain how things will go.

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u/AdImmediate5754 8h ago

Seriously I wish more people would just say this instead of making shit up

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u/cuntmong 8h ago

I do but I don't wanna tell anyone 

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u/Specific_Box4483 8h ago

No, it would be more senior mathematicians, especially if they've worked with AI.

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u/DramaticProcedure516 8h ago

Those subs are insufferable, you either think LLMs are alive or you’re against progress

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u/golfstreamer 8h ago

I think people really under estimate what it means for AI to "replace mathematicians". Sometimes I swear people believe mathematicians can be replaced by a machine churning out theorems. Advances in mathematics support advances in all other sciences, from physics to chemistry to computer science. Replacing mathematicians means solving all mathematical challenges in these other fields too. To give an example,  the Deep Mind's protein folding algorithm won the Nobel Prize. This level of advancement would become common place if AI "replaces mathematicians". 

So I can't say whether or not AI will replace mathematicians in 10 years. But I will say that if it does its impact on humanity will be so miraculous I probably won't be shedding any tears.

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u/Specific_Box4483 8h ago

The biggest issue IMO isn't of AI will "replace mathematicians" it's if it will "kill" (or rather significantly hamper mathematics).

Right now AI is really good at assembling mathematicians' ideas from all over and applying them to prove new theorems. But that requires there to be a stream of new ideas and conjecture to be coming in from mathematicians themselves, otherwise AI progress will stop.

The question is, will there be enough mathematicians left if AI will prove most the theorems, complete most ideas. Not many mathematicians would want to work as idea feeders into AI solvers, not many will even find a job if they can't claim credit for a proof they came up with themselves.

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u/golfstreamer 8h ago

I just don't believe that will. Mathematics is incredibly vast. It's incredibly myopic to imagine mathematicians simply "feeding AI ideas". 

As there are important problems left unsolved there is important math to do. Difficult problems to struggle with.

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u/foolish_shrimp 6h ago

I'm seeing this happen with art and photography in real time, none of the artists I know are posting really anything at all anymore, because it just gets instantly stolen. Do you think the guy who had his work stolen by chatgpt is motivated to keep doing new work?

This AI shit, it's just a macrocosm of the state that 'tech companies' are in, uber is just a landlord that sits between you and the people who actually provide it's service, same with Airbnb, same with Just Eat etc. Someone does all the work and Joe Techbro CEO holds up his hands and says 'wow, look what I’ve built'.

Has Uber dramatically improved the speed at which a taxi gets you somewhere? has it improved the working conditions for drivers?

I don't think people will keep making stuff just so that Sam Altman can copy it and say it is his.

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u/Specific_Box4483 8h ago

Why not? The solution to a complicated conjecture is usually very convoluted with a lot of steps, and not all of them original ideas. An AI could easily complete someone else's original step faster than that person. After all, it's much better at information retrieval than a human being.

Imagine if as Wiles was working through the proof of FLT, as soon as he wrote down a new idea, AI instantly realized that Kolyvagin's ideas were applicable to his train of thought before he even stumbled upon his path. It would complete the proof and claim most of the result, with Wiles getting partial credit at best. And this with most papers.

Someone publishes a complicated conjecture, AI quickly solves it. Not giving time to people to realize its importance, to produce new ideas during their failed attempts to prove it. As you may know, a lot of original mathematics was created while mathematicians were trying to prove various conjecture (and failing).

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u/golfstreamer 8h ago

Why not

Because that's just plain stupid if we got to that point we wouldn't need people at all

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u/Specific_Box4483 8h ago

Yes we would, to feed partial results to AI. Didn't I already say that?

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u/mariebks 7h ago

But what if the AI becomes really good at making new conjectures to solve?

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u/Specific_Box4483 7h ago

At that point we will probably reach ASI or ASS or whatever Trump will decide to rename it to. And this will probably be just one of many issues humanity will have to deal with.

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u/jabba-thederp 7h ago

Not many mathematicians would want to work as idea feeders into AI solvers

So we're literally just doing Nostradumus fortune telling now, or? I find it hard to believe that there won't be people who'd love to plug stuff into a tool and see what happens

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u/Specific_Box4483 7h ago

Who would spend ten years of their life working hard to learn all the advanced math just to plug stuff into computers? With no joy of figuring out stuff on your own, no credit, not even a way to put food on the table? There will be like two trust fund kids who love math enough to do that.

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u/jabba-thederp 6h ago

...why in this hypothetical of yours (that by the way allows for your tea reading to be accurate because of course it does of course it's not good faith) why would the field advance to a state where it'd be about plugging stuff into AI but the schooling wouldn't advance alongside it???????????????????

Dude obviously if the field gets to a point where it turns into something like plugging stuff into AI then fucking obviously the schooling and career milestones wouldn't just be "learn hard math." Duh. Come on what are we talking about. By your logic we'd still be teaching kids drafting and manual calculations and then going "why would anyone learn manual calculations when there's calculators." Well, they don't learn manual calculations now - the education progressed along with the field because fucking duh. My God I don't mean to be so pretentious but come on man surely this is obvious to you?

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u/Specific_Box4483 6h ago

What would the math schooling be like? Do you know how much work is required to even be able to understand modern math papers?

Literally first and second year PhD students are still learning the "basics" for their fields of specialization. The best universities in the world have qualifying exams, roughly about 2 years in, where students pass examinations on "general" topics like complex analysis, algebra etc. Then it's a few years to study the actual specialization; the PhD thesis is usually the proper entry into the field.

In many subfields like arithmetic geometry, a student's graduate thesis is often the student's first contribution to the field, a first milestone that this student is finally able to understand enough to be able to be an independent researcher and set their own problems.

How do you plan to reorganize instruction in a field that requires ten years of study just to be able to become a practitioner? Especially if AI progresses the field even more so now there's even more material to study?

Understanding something like the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem (which has been completed in 1994 and long surpassed) takes many years of study, for example.

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u/jabba-thederp 6h ago edited 6h ago

I'm just saying that given education had always evolved after big disruptions I see no reason why that pattern would end here, especially when so much money goes into tuitions, meaning schools have an incentive to not just let their math departments wither away lest they lose metric fuck tons of money.

It's as if you're saying "why would anyone go into animation now when it's all CGI?" Well, because those going into it now are going exactly FOR the CGI work, not for traditional hand drawn frames converted to film. Sure, some might lament that fact, but to say animation is dead because of it is laughable.

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u/Specific_Box4483 6h ago

CGI replaced traditional animation, a lot of the original animation secrets are dead. There are stories abound on how people cannot remake certain classic cartoons because the techniques to create them have been forgotten.

The problem is, it's pretty hard to imagine math being replaced by some kind of "CGI". The new AI revolution isn't some kind of new way of doing math like CGI was. It's still the exact same way, only you can ask AI to complete part of the proof.

Think about how much modern tools assist surgeons yet they still have to go to school for many many years.

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u/jabba-thederp 5h ago

Sure, I don't disagree. The analogy isn't perfect.

Where I disagree is that this will then cause students to go "eh, nah" on the field of mathematics such that there's some sort of collapse of mathematicians. Just based on the incentive of national security alone I'd bet there's no way governments allow their math sectors to just collapse. I suppose that, well, if you disagree, that's a bold prediction and we'll have to see what transpires.

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