alt Hacker NewsI am not a mathematician, but I can’t see how we are going to address the problem which we already see in coding:
Impossibility to independently validate all AI results
And in math it goes even worse. In coding code reviews are typically still the form of action you do within days. In math, historically, the lifecycle of proof is months if not years. Take as an example Millennium problems. They require at least two years of validity after publishing. Two years! In modern times with amount of output AI can produce, it feels like infinity.
We are inches close if not at the moment already when humans can’t reliable validate proofs and mathematics produced by AI. Then next research will be based on this AI-written-no-human-in-the-loop results. And we will end up in just few years in a world where novel and frontier problems will be articulated by AI and proven by AI based on AI results and humans will be incapable of understating the mere nature of the solution.
I don't think that's actually the real problem. Along with the progress in answering mathematical questions, recent progress on AI-powered autoformalisation has been astonishing. All the recent AI discoveries have been accompanied by Lean proofs.
And, yes: that doesn't absolutely guarantee correctness. The Lean kernel has had soundness bugs, and may have some still. But it's pretty strong evidence of correctness nevertheless.
The concern among mathematicians is not mainly that they doubt the correctness of any of these discoveries, but that human understanding may be devalued.