alt Hacker News>> If better training data is the reason here, it would still be a case of the models doing something that is in and of itself super useful! The models really can take that data and distill it into solutions for similar problems faster than humans can. This is great!
It's perhaps great in the short term although it's not very clear who it's great for. I'm not sure mathematicians find it all so great, I mean.
In the long term, if this contrives to destroy the tradition of human mathematics the whole endeavour is self-defeating. In time, there will be nobody left with the knowledge and skills to produce mathematics to train AI to do mathematics.
And then we'll be left with no mathematics at all: we'll have no human mathematicians and no AI that can do mathematics, either.
I was pretty depressed when I read about what happened with Navier Stokes this morning. The Clay Math prizes were a significant motivation through my math career, and I know a lot of computer scientists and physicists that feel similarly. I didn't think I was gonna resolve P vs NP or the BSD conjecture, but I did really research that felt like I was working towards something incredible. What is the younger generation left with? Hey kids betcha can't resolve the Collatz conjecture, our superintelligence can't either! Still pretty depressed about it, to be honest. Intellectualism is dead. We can return to happy agrarianism, I guess. At least the AI doesn't wanna eat my snap peas.