Even if that happens, what’s the point if there’s no human involvement? AI doing math for math’s sake? And doing what with it?

I think a better analogy would be comparing to an ancient human instead of an ant. An ancient human would have none of the basic abstractions that we take for granted today like literacy and arithmetic, so it would be very difficult for them to even attempt trying to understand quantum mechanics. But I don't think it's impossible because our ability to learn by stacking abstractions is basically endless——so far as our health permits at least.

We've been those ants for a million years, and only in the last 100 did we start to wrap our heads around quantum physics. We are the purpose behind creating LLMs. There's plenty in the universe we don't understand, and it's very human to keep striving to do so.

If you believe that math is discovering, it's natural to think that all of that AI math already exists and is just waiting for us to find ways to discover and understand it.

Don't write us out quite yet. :)

Or maybe ants and humans are qualitatively different. Maybe there's a critical mass of intelligence where you can pretty much understand anything, and maybe humans are past that threshold. I don't know that for sure, but I don't think we're anywhere close to hitting fundamental limits to our ability to understand the universe.

Need? We don't need lots of things, including computers. We did well without them for hundreds of thousands of years.

We want to understand. Quantum physics, mathematics, how stuff works. Ants don't.

That want is not a given, not all of us have that drive. In fact, very few of us have it. So far though, it seems multiple disconnected civilizations learned to keep that trait going instead of suppressing it and focusing only on practical ant-like activities.

> Once AI math goes so far beyond human abilities, any human involvement is like an ant trying to understand quantum physics

This makes no sense whatsoever.

We need more, because there will always be far more difficult problems yet to be discovered and solved, and that means, we certainly need expert humans to define and verify them.

If you cannot even explain the problem you are facing, not only you don't understand it, but you certainly would not be able to know if the AI solved your problem correctly.