Knowing a few PhD candidates and non-tenure track postdocs, the “younger, hungry mathematicians” are more worried about finding a damn job in the poorest job market - both academic and in industry - in a decade.

They don’t have any more patience for this.

The problem here is that while you can call what OpenAI does "mathematics", I would hesitate to call it science. Science as a process of acquiring and developing knowledge within a domain involves a lot more than just dumping unfinished work on the scientific community. Among other things, it involves developing frameworks and understanding of the domain, formulating questions, creating results in a fashion suitable for verification/testing/replication, and relating these results to and integrating them with that edifice.

"AI models will surely get better at writing "enjoyable proofs,"" why? Why is that surely true? they've increased in all other capacities at shocking rates while still writing awful, slippery, turgid prose. Very silly to assume that this will just go away.

> There's a new generation of younger, hungry mathematicians that are highly interested in figuring out why the result is true

The problem is that right now mathematicians don't have the economical incentive to read these AI generated results. Even if you love mathematics and all that, it's always more important to get a job, and for that it doesn't seem like a good idea to invest time around problems that AI touches because you can't compete with it and you don't know if tomorrow they'll improve by x10 the sota.

I think quite a few mathematicians would be interested in using AI to figure out the answer.

But providing the answer in gibberish along with a certificate is not that, it's at best a cruel way to do it, but I'm leaning towards the idea that it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to do math and what it means to communicate a result.

If you think sending an answer in gibberish is acceptable just because it's true then SSdtIG5vdCBzdXJlIHdoYXQgdG8gdGVsbCB5b3UsIGJ1dCB3ZSBkaXNhZ3JlZSBvbiB0aGF0.

The question is why the situation is what it is. Did OpenAI publish a large volume of unreadable proofs because that was their best attempt to contribute to the field of mathematics? Or does OpenAI feel that it’s more profitable for them if people come to see mathematics as something that’s less focused on understanding and more focused on using AI to generate proofs?

How about the scenario where they are already better if you give them more time/tokens/…? Would it be a more relatable concern in that case?

Like all the junior devs getting opportunities left and right.

So OpenAI should be able to flood the world with AI pollution and ask scientists and mathematicians to wade through it all and tell us if there is any sense in it, then sit back and wait for them to report in?

Nice idea.

I think this might feel about the same as getting a PR from Claude that purports to solve some issue that it deems exists, but it doesn’t conform to the contribution guide, isn’t clear in its objectives and looks quite likely to be utter bullshit. I close them without comment and lock the issue.

You don't know what you're talking about. Just because it was created by an LLM, and verified in Lean, does not make it true. The whole point of writing a proof is for it to be understandable.

You're passionate about this problem, right?

There's a "Silicon Valley-ism" for you. We offer a thing in whatever form we want and people "who are passionate" will gobble it up, should gobble it up, 'cause they're "passionate".

[dead]

[dead]