alt Hacker NewsAI can't yet come up with any new ideas to make the inductive leap to solve a math problem. New ideas are what get the accolades and using an old idea just means the original author missed something. We are still at the author missed something stage that AI is doing today.
It can definitely be a good research assistant though
Replies
bckgrndrdtn • today at 1:08 PM
All well and good, but we should also admit that under this criterion 95% of published math papers don't contain new ideas but are just filling in stuff that previous authors missed.
Thank you for your comment.
I had assumed that the recent OpenAI solution to an Erdos problem represented original mathematical thought.
I went looking for more details, and found this Scientific American article which provided some nuance I had previously missed, namely that the mathematicians involved don't think genAI created any really new mathematics - just applied what existed in an intelligent, elegant way:
https://archive.is/oNCSO
So, impressive though the result is, perhaps your claim has more grounds than I had thought.