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tmp10423288442today at 3:28 AM1 replyview on HN

Why would society fund mathematicians if they decided to become a guild that hides secrets? They could pursue that as a hobby, but they’d end up like the coders who refuse to use LLMs - rapidly becoming irrelevant and a bit sad from an outsider’s perspective.


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rzerowantoday at 8:04 AM

Ah but heres the thing , society/gov expects mathematicians to be productive and tries to measure that by awards/publications/citations gained. Within a guild ope or secret they could possibly use a local LLM (even if slow) to accelerate their collective output.While ensuring their credit/publication/citations remain intact rather than with the AI labs taking a lions share of that.

Think along the lines of the Nicolas Bourbaki persona/collective : " was a collective pseudonym chosen in 1934 by a group of young French mathematicians. None of them carried the name alone; all of them carried it together. And under that name, they launched the most ambitious mathematical publishing project of the twentieth century: a series of texts rebuilding modern mathematics from scratch, on entirely axiomatic foundations."[1]

[1] https://abakcus.com/articles/nicolas-bourbaki