Do you buy stuff made in factories of do you open your wallet for everything handmade craft products? Or it's fine as long as craftsmen's jobs got replaced, just not when yours? Do you ever use a self-checkout? An ATM? Or do you pay extra to get cash from a human cashier at the bank?

I appreciate the sentiment, especially after the escalation of the last few weeks. But I am hoping this story can become an example of why mathematicians are still very much needed and LLMs are still severely lacking when it comes to displacing scientists. Conway's conjecture has no application whatsoever, even within pure maths, and the only point in pursuing it is what you can learn in the process, and whether you can make something beautiful. LLMs are consistently unable to do the latter (and yes, some mathematicians are also not very good at it... this is an old topic of discussion, just amplified by current events). To me it feels like the technology is still where it was in 2015 when DeepDream images came out: increasingly good at pattern matching, but still a lot more like dreaming than thinking. So our job is still there somewhere.

The problem is rather how quickly we can change our ways of working to make sure the training and hiring pipeline does not collapse. That's the disastrous scenario, for both the individuals affected and the discipline, that we must avert somehow. I wish we had an easy answer to that. I certainly don't. But I like to think that at least engaging with the public in a constructive way will have a net positive effect.

Needless to say, I disagree that what Prof. Mantova is planning to do (digesting the proof and making it human-understandable) represents the "end of [mathematicians'] career". Systematizing has always been a key part of human mathematical work, and tidying up a raw proof can be viewed as a kind of systematizing.

My hope is also that Mantova and very possibly L'Innocente will get a substantial share of credit for their role in the resolution of this conjecture by Conway: the AI would not have embarked on this were it not for their prior work. So even human mathematicians with an inclination for more exploratory "problem solving" will have plenty to do in the future. (The story is actually not that different for the recent Navier-Stokes forced blowup result, which also built on key conceptual work from 2023 by Córdoba and Martinez-Zoroa.)

WTF? Have some humility towards someone who took the time to talk about their work. And made intellectual progress.

Air your LLM greviences someplace else.