alt Hacker News> Humans are close to their ceiling. AIs are just getting started.
The whole point of mathematics is to vastly exceed that natural ceiling by gradually building a framework for understanding. In fact it’s wrong to speak of a ceiling altogether. If there were a ceiling, we’d have hit it long ago.
AIs have already swallowed the entire history of human thought, but apparently they’re ’just getting started’. I can only assume you don’t know what mathematicians actually do.
Abstractions can certainly enable this kind of "telescoping" effect of understanding, but not everything can be compressed with clever abstractions. Some things are inherently incompressible and there is no neat and insightful short explanation for why it is true, just a massive proof, but it may still have provably good properties for building a chip or power plant.
We have naturally only explored the mathematical universe in the parts where telescoping via clever abstractions can get us. But there is much more. Being able to juggle more things in your mind at the same time can have qualitatively massive benefits.
Information theory and proof theory, algorithmic information theory etc has of course explored this.