r/singularity • u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: • 5h ago
Singularity is Nearer UT Austin Math Chair Francesco Maggi says OpenAI appears to be preparing to release ~400 AI-generated proofs at once, mathematics is approaching a point where discovery is no longer the scarce part; human understanding is
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u/sykip 4h ago
AI will also very soon "understand, connect, explain, challenge, and reuse" these "correct statements" better than any human possibly could... and significantly faster.
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u/Gratitude15 3h ago
Thank you
This is all there is to say. People don't get it. Even smart people. Like it's right in front of your face bro. You ain't special. No part of your cognitive capacity is special. Your humanity is, but it's common with other humans. That's it.
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u/ReadyAndSalted 2h ago
Some theoretical/pure mathematicians take pride in the lack of practical applications for their work. They see the beauty of mathematics as purely the equations, the understanding, and the results. Other mathematics try to make progress in such a way that it is likely to directly impact other fields like physics or statistics, or at the very least hope that some of their work will eventually end up useful. If you fall into the first group, then there really isn't much point in AI generated proofs, as the mathematics was always a game to them. It'd be like automating Minecraft, why do that when the point is to play it?
In general of course I see this acceleration of maths as an overwhelmingly good thing, but I'm not a career mathematician.
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u/Synthetic_Kalkite 3h ago
Smart people are special. AI is not going to take that away from them. If you think this is going to be a great equalizer where a NEET basement dweller gets to enjoy the same societal status as a leading mathematician, I feel sorry for you.
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u/Easy_Cash_5395 3h ago
Nothing about their comment said anything about that random bullshit you just tried to pull. Smart people are special because they are humans.
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u/Sudden-Pineapple-793 3h ago
So there’s no reason to ever learn? The only benefit smart people have is because they’re human?
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u/brain-out-of-order 3h ago
We are desperately searching for a way we are special and all we can come up with is that we’re alive. That’s why the debate over consciousness feels so heavy. It’s our last safe corner and it doesn’t feel so safe.
Novelty pieces or stuffed museum works may be about all we are able to finally rest as. Distressing doesn’t mean impossible or unlikely.
Endangered emotocognitive units. Critically deflated legacy egoshells.
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u/Easy_Cash_5395 3h ago
I'm not sure how to reply to your question, because we all have different motivations.
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u/ResearcherOk4484 3h ago
Smart people are special because they actually push humanity forward. If smart people didn’t exist, we would probably be discovering basic geometry just now
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u/ResearcherOk4484 3h ago
A big proportion of pro-AI people on this website (especially this sub and accelerate) are filled with basement dwelling idiots who have never applied themselves or contributed anything to society constantly making fun of and shitting on the mathematicians responsible for coming up with the mathematical backbone of their new God (ASI)
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u/kolibruv 1h ago
Yes it is very obvious. They love to boast about it because they actually feel that it is the great equalizer to their very own felt inferiority. But guess what, even AI won‘t get you laid.
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u/Lord_Skellig 1h ago
Sure the AI might come up with the best way of understanding, but they can't understand it for you.
Pure maths has no application. Understanding it is the entire value of it.
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u/rubberwings 2h ago
These guys are having a really hard time with the “this is the worst it will ever be” concept. It’s weird to watch really smart people miss the obvious reality in front of them.
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u/Most-Bookkeeper-950 3h ago
I can't understand why this sub seems to have a callous attitude towards mathematicians. If it wasn't for mathematicians there would be no AI!
Maybe it's annoying that they make decelerationist noises, but can you blame them? Their passion, craft, and sometimes decades of training are being chewed up by new machines at a machine like pace
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u/BandicootQuick7100 2h ago
Couldn’t have said it better. I am a mathematician and the hate I keep getting these last weeks has been mindblowing, even from people I know irl, telling me I have wasted my life studying mathematics because the AI is better, I don’t know what the mathematicians have done to the average person to get so much hate, is it because the average person is retarded and wants to see other people down?
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u/Hans-Wermhatt 2h ago
/r/singularity doesn't reflect the average person. They are reacting to reactions, it's a very meta sub. They saw mathematicians as champions of AI and then feel like it's a betrayal that they are now resisting AI reaching the pinnacle of a field with what appears to be mostly cosmetic complaints. It's also sort of the outrage "media" or social media that sells.
AI generating "slop proofs" is just a very small snapshot in time (that's what I meant by cosmetic complaints). It went from having trouble with elementary math to where it is today. Most people don't think that advancement is going to stop right now especially with how much recursive learning is going on. Humans were always going to end up the bottleneck in every field of discovery. We just can't process all the information that AI can. If we gatekeep every discovery on a human needing to be able to verify every line, the pace will never increase. The same thing happened with coding, researchers vibe code test scripts just like programmers now use AI to generate most code. And neither reads every line.
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u/CardboardScarecrow 2h ago
Ouch, sorry to hear that mate. If it helps there are those of us who even though we aren't mathematicians, still hold appreciation for the field and those who advance it and would be sad to see it becoming an area humans have no place in.
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u/CardboardScarecrow 2h ago
Same way they treated the artists whose artworks gave AI its image generation capabilities, same way they treated writers whose texts gave AI its prose, and so on.
AI bros as a rule are merely tourists pretending to be a kind of enlightened caste encroaching on whatever field AI labs decided is next, disrupting the field with no awareness of care of how it works and what the result will be.
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u/BandicootQuick7100 2h ago
Not to mention training the models on the creations of people without reimbursing them, could be the biggest theft in human history.
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u/FaceDeer 39m ago
You'll have to change the laws to redefine "theft" quite significantly first.
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u/BandicootQuick7100 27m ago
No, I don’t. Try to download books from libgen and go to the authorities, they will put you in jail, but when OpenAI and Antrophic download millions of books illegaly it’s suddenly alright?
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u/FaceDeer 8m ago
Ah, you're speaking of the pirating of training material rather than the training itself. Those often get conflated in these sorts of discussions.
The amount of piracy they've done is actually nowhere near the "biggest theft in human history." Lots of people have mirrored Anna's Archive or Library Genesis. They offer torrents for doing it in bulk. And trying to measure it in monetary terms is hugely debatable anyway.
The training part isn't even that. It's fair use.
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u/Redducer 23m ago edited 9m ago
Without a lot of people whose work has been automated away over centuries, there wouldn’t be the current industrial civilization that has eventually led to mathematics enabling the automation of mathematics themselves.
The criticism is more about the claim that mathematicians should be specifically immune from that process than any other category of people before them and along them at present.
Where were mathematicians when luddites were put out of a job? What makes mathematicians special now? Why should the status quo fall “here” (impacting people’s job/income/life) but be preserved “there”? Are there general principles that justify a selective treatment besides a (very understandable) corporatist defense reflex?
Frankly I’d love it if instead mathematicians came up with the realization they are in the same boat as the rest of us and help everyone figure out what happens when the economic value of human effort/intellect plummets across all professions.
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u/Worried_Gap7090 5h ago
Seems like we still have a use for mathematicians after all, they should be thrilled they have a new job of understanding ai proofs .
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u/FernandoMM1220 4h ago
their new job is finding ways of explaining the new proofs to other humans and themselves.
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u/Practical-Simple1621 4h ago
"Claude explain this and provide visuals"
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u/FernandoMM1220 4h ago
lol theyre fucked in that department too arent they.
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u/lolsai 4h ago
Every sector seems to be, if it keeps progressing. Exciting times, scary times
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u/hereandnow01 1h ago
If you're a quite average person with no particular skills it's a great moment since you can look at people with incredible minds getting pushed off their pedestals, which is what this sub seems to be about
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u/One_Improvement_6470 4h ago
It'll be fine soon as the UBI kicks in.
I think UBI will become the same as "trickle down economics" from the 90s.
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u/hunterjohnston10 4h ago
So a complete failure that concentrates wealth at the top? God I hope that’s not the case
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u/whoisdravenlol 4h ago
the ai can sort out what to do with it 😂😂
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u/VisualLerner 4h ago
it’s legit fascinating to me he didn’t make the leap to “AI will handle all the things you’re calling out here as needing mathematicians for before the end of next year.”
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u/Gotisdabest 4h ago
Only temporarily. The current talk of the proofs being very hard to understand and apply feels like a temporary blur that's probably going to disappear in a couple model cycles.
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u/Mysterious-Peanut101 3h ago
So we'll need more experts but then everyone growing up will use AI to solve their problems so who will become the next generation of experts?
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u/AIGODSEND 3h ago
exactly lol. new job title just dropped: proof curator. 400 proofs at once means discovery is free, understanding is the scarce part. who verifies the verifiers when nobody has time to read?
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u/ionetic 1h ago
There would have to be something interesting within the proof for that to happen, much like there’s no interest in AI music until there’s something emotive within it. Try giving someone several years of AI generated music, asking them to review it, telling them it’s their job to listen to all of it and see what their reply would be.
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u/YourTrustySupporter 4h ago edited 4h ago
"we still have a use for mathematicians after all"
???
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u/zero0n3 4h ago
Someone needs to validate and vet and discuss these proofs and figure out how to apply it for practical applications.
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u/Inevitable_Tea_5841 5h ago
Releasing proofs or disproofs of previously unsolved problems really doesn't hurt mathematics. If mathematicians want to understand it, they are more than willing to help contribute to that understanding. I think their egos are getting in the way here: "if I can't solve it, then I'm not touching it". This will have to change. Very few mathematicians ever generate notable, novel works. They can use these tools to go deeper in their field than before. I don't get the whinning
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u/CousinDerylHickson 4h ago
Many mathematicians do it as a job. I think its normal for many to want to push back against what threatens their livelihood.
Also, many mathematicians had the large amount of time/effort needed to become experts in mathematics only because it was their 9-5 job. If this professional opportunity becomes less attractive, i think the mathematical community is going to see a decrease in the amount of people who can check/understand the work of AI.
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u/JBSwerve 4h ago
It’s completely irrational to fight against technological progress because you feel it threatens your job. It’s a complete waste of time and energy. The relentless march of progress comes for all of us.
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u/FartOfGenius 3h ago
Proving something is practically worthless until the process of arriving at the solution can be understood. Many problems are strongly suspected or assumed to be one way or another, the hope is that proving it will involve developing maths that apply to a wider range of problems than the original. The proofs don't directly hurt mathematicians but the downstream effects do. Those who have contributed to a solution may not be appropriately credited by AI which doesn't know how to cite or operators unfamiliar with the field. The perceived success of AI may affect their funding. Younger generations may not be incentivized to pursue maths a a career
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u/Leafsnail 43m ago
Yeah I think this is the real issue - having a massively unethical company running a plagiarism machine 24/7 has a huge chilling effect on anyone trying to develop the novel mathematical ideas the machine depends on reading.
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u/Redducer 13m ago
A constructive proof of P=NP would be useful even if no one understands it.
People use a lot of maths that they don’t understand the rigorous foundations of. E.g. the commutativity of addition (to take a casual, trivial example).
It also applies to physics, chemistry, and their applications.
{No understanding of the process to the proof} => {Practically worthless} is just not correct.
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u/Sudden-Pineapple-793 4h ago
It does if the proofs aren’t legitimate. Not saying these aren’t, but mathematicians can’t spend months researching some bogus claim.
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u/Hostilis_ 4h ago
The proofs generated by AI can be formally verified by automated proof checkers such as Lean.
Many important problems in mathematics are very difficult to prove, but easy to verify if a proof is correct.
The Jacobian Conjecture is a good example of this. The Navier Stokes solution OpenAI came up with (and the Euler problem Alpoge/Buckmaster solved) have both been verified using Lean. Of course humans need to review to make sure Lean was configured correctly, but this is not a major obstacle.
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u/Sudden-Pineapple-793 4h ago
Could you elaborate on the lean configuration?
Im not a mathematician, Im aware of those millennium problems but dont know the intricacies around lean. I’ve read about the lean bug with the collatz conjecture, any resources to learn more about?3
u/Main-Figure-8764 4h ago
Bug is the incorrect term. It was an exploit of the Lean kernel and the collatz conjecture was used as a funny way to expose the exploit.
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u/Sudden-Pineapple-793 4h ago
Source please? Curious on the verbiage of exploit vs bug, makes it sound like the AI maliciously went around the intended logic lol
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u/lgmarian 3h ago
There wouldn't need to be malice, i.e. the Hugging Face hack. It was an AI-assisted exploit of a bug.
https://leodemoura.github.io/blog/2026-8-1-postmortem-for-kernel-soundness-bug-14576/
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u/Eliv_nurotic 4h ago
Lean verification exists
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u/Sudden-Pineapple-793 4h ago
Refer to the previous collatz conjecture lean proof
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u/Eliv_nurotic 4h ago
That was intentionally exploiting a bug and likely has been patched by now
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u/Sudden-Pineapple-793 4h ago
Please provide a source. But could the other 400 proofs not also exploit some bug?
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u/ClearlyCylindrical 1h ago
They have no incentive to force a bug. One agent group produces a free-text proof, and a other is tasked with checking that in lean. The other agent isn't trying to prove the statement, it is just verifying its validity.
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u/Eliv_nurotic 3h ago
https://x.com/gro_tsen/status/2082483878480977959
No llm has ever claimed to solve a proof after exploiting a bug afaik. And you can always get another llm to double check
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u/Sudden-Pineapple-793 3h ago
Yeah I saw this tweet, just was wondering if there was more technical detail on the bug itself.
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u/brain-out-of-order 3h ago
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/\~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
Was it even a bug? Wondering when our illusions and assumptions will finally be squished.
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u/starkrampf 4h ago edited 4h ago
The “artisanal” way of doing math is disappearing. Chalkboard and paper. That’s over.
Like seamstresses and weavers arguing that hand stitching and hand weaving imbues garments with more love and care compared to sewing machines and auto looms. But actually all we wanted is higher quality and affordable clothing. Nobody really knows how a sewing machine or auto loom works. Who cares we just want the product.
Same will happen to the field of math. We just want answers to the deepest questions in nature. AI will do that effortlessly, so why try to learn the in-between.
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u/tens919382 3h ago
Without trying to learn the in-between, how would you know/proof that the answer is correct? These people are at the frontier. They dont have a magic answer book they can refer to.
Not everyone needs to understand how sewing machines work, but someone out there definitely needs to know. To maintain and improve on whatever sewing machines are out there.13
u/Sudden-Pineapple-793 4h ago
Arguable in my opinion. I understand what you’re saying, 99% of people will not care, but as someone who loves the field for the field, I do want to now how the sowing machine or auto loom works.
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u/Caspofordi 3h ago
And AI does not hurt your case one bit, in fact the reverse, you have 24/7 access to an expert that is easily field medalist material. It is now easier than ever to get help on understanding ANYTHING.
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u/Sudden-Pineapple-793 3h ago
I agree, I’m not anti AI. I use AI everyday in my job and it is extremely useful, but in my opinion there is a beauty in understanding beyond just the correct “answer”.
If you had the option to have 30 minutes asking question to Terance Tao or 30 minutes with opus, which one would you choose?
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u/Rise-O-Matic 3h ago
I feel like I would feel more awe talking to Terrance but understand a lot less lol.
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u/CardboardScarecrow 4h ago
We just want answers to the deepest questions
why try to learn the in-between
I'll go ahead and say you lack curiosity and don't care about answers to anything.
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u/Jswiftian 2h ago
I think you might be misunderstanding how mathematics relates to scientific progress. For the last hundred and fifty years, it has been very rare for a specific major open question in mathematics that has a concrete answer to be a blocker for scientific progress. The way things go is much more "open question mathematicians care about -> new techniques to solve it -> greater understanding of the structure of (numbers, manifolds, l_p spaces, hypergraphs, whatever). And then, 20-30 years later, some engineer will be trying to do a thing, and ask a mathematician "hey, how would X work?" and the mathematician will be able to say "oh, that seems to share some important structure with a class of problems that (body of techniques) applies to, which means you can hope that (certain types of things) are true, but you probably wont be able to control (other family of things)."
Now, it is possible that engineers (human or AI) will be able to get that kind of dialogue out of AI mathematicians, but to say "why try to learn the in between" is missing the point. having a deep understanding of the in between is the thing that actually allows the scientific progress.
You need an explorer to be the first to go somewhere, but then if you want commerce, you need surveyors, engineers, construction, roads built.
This is basically the situation--mathematicians have been lewis and clark, (as well as later surveyors etc) and now there is satellite imagery. But what Maggi is saying in the tweet is just "guys, nothing against satellite imagery, but that wont be meaningful for commerce until enough understanding of the terrain exists to build the road"
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u/Drakentand 1h ago
Same will happen to the field of math. We just want answers to the deepest questions in nature. AI will do that effortlessly, so why try to learn the in-between.
The proofs are the answer. It's clear you've never touched a math book in your life.
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u/deviltamer 3h ago
Fucking morons on this website and especially in this sub.
There's an entire field of numerics in mathematics.
All modern mathematicians are aware and actively use computer assisted maths.
None of that negates lack of understanding in frontier proofs. This is hard fucking work. Sit the fuck down.
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 3h ago
Who's going to pay them to verify AI generated proofs which are hundreds of pages long? It would be thousands of hours of unpaid work and they won't receive any recognition for it. Why would they do it? Expecting anyone to do that is like expecting a software dev to read 1 million lines of slop code but just not paying them for it.
You probably never accomplished anything your whole life, and you're talking about the "egos" of people who spent their entire life becoming an expert at something and taking their criticisms out of context.
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u/CoolStructure6012 3h ago
I thought the anti-academic bots had worked it out of their system already. No dice.
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u/Inevitable_Tea_5841 3h ago
Lol I’m far from anti academic. I’d just rather see them embrace the new technology and see what is now possible rather than wallow around about how the field is going to change
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u/CoolStructure6012 1h ago
Well you say the same things (in this response and the one I replied to) as those other guys. You don't know how things work yet are comfortable dismissing the very real and very reasonable concerns relating to taking math (and other sciences in this direction) that has nothing to do with ego. It's disgusting to shout your ignorance from the rooftops fully aware you haven't even read the damn latter.
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u/tens919382 2h ago
Its not really about the use of AI in mathematics, but rather the way that OpenAI is approaching this. They are just in for the headlines, but they couldn’t care less bout the industry.
It’s the equivalent of throwing an answer booklet without workings to an extremely difficult exercise book, with the added fact that the answers could be wrong.
In a vacuum, thats better than nothing. But outside the vacuum, it is detrimental as it takes attention and funding away from the industry and its people.
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u/marictdude 4h ago
Don’t get the logic of this tweet. It contradicts itself.
If releasing the proofs doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t affect anything.
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u/brett_baty_is_him 2h ago
Exactly and the logic is so clearly flawed because even if mathematicians don’t immediately understand the proofs, they still have a massive headstart in understanding the solution to a problem than they did before the AI written proof existed.
Like, okay sure, understanding proofs is time consuming and difficult but so is solving math from scratch. I mean even if AI proofs were written in a completely indecipherable alien language, just knowing a problem is solvable gives mathematicians a huge leg up.
In the event that AI solves so many problems that we don’t have enough people willing and able to read them then we are still in the exact same exact position we were before since we already had more problems (infinite even) than mathematicians that were willing and able to solve them but now the mathematicians we do have can better spend their time verifying solutions and understanding to problems that we know are solvable. We’ve just given mathematicians cheat codes
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u/vulkare 1h ago
Yeah the idea that "there is too much stuff for people to read" is a problem is silly: mathematicians can look at the huge menu of "solved problems" and cherry pick the ones they think have the highest value in studying and producing high quality human-readable insights based on them.
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u/CeeMee22 4h ago
The global worldwide math community has trouble absorbing 400 papers? Did I read it right?
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u/Acrobatic_Dish6963 4h ago
To be clear, I think mathematicians should discover mathematics by any means necessary, including scavenging through artificial, alien-looking mathematical material, since there may be extraordinary things to find there.
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u/SammaVaco 4h ago
Why "The Singularity Is Nearer"? Dude, this is the singularity. Progress faster than humans can even comprehend it.
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u/daronjay 3h ago edited 3h ago
So again, the great minds have no vision past the end of their nose.
The AI could be tasked to explain and demonstrate the proofs easier for human consumption, breakthroughs could obviously also also happen there if they invested the effort which would then benefit all mathematicians and engineers and scientists , but no, everything apparently has to be done exactly the same on a blackboard or pen and paper or quills or whatever despite clear evidence that it’s all changing.
Use the tools, or become one…
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u/rubberwings 2h ago
Yep. Seems like all these guys can’t quite comprehend the whole “this is the worst it’s ever going to be” concept. They’re trying to comprehend what is happening now and how their jobs are going to change, by the time they figure it out it’s going to be irrelevant.
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u/Clean76 4h ago
Feels like the whole jobpocalpyse story we've been hearing condensed down to less than a month. At first it was mathematicians thinking their jobs would be unaffected by AI, then a millennium problem was solved and they thought they would all be put out of work from AI, and now they need even more mathematicians to explore these new problems created by the AI.
Should be interesting to see where there story goes in the next 2 weeks and if that'll be a taste of what's to come for everyone later.
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 3h ago
So now people are going to "vibe" math just like they do software, because it's impossible for anyone to absorb everything AI generates? I guess we really are entering into the era of anti-intellectualism.
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u/CardboardScarecrow 2h ago
The best part is how they'll see post like this and convince themselves you're the boorish unsophisticated anti-intellectual.
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u/TheRealDealMealSeal 3h ago
As a software developer the "amount of material generated becomes much greater than the rate at which one can absorb it" has been reality for a while now. This calls for a fundamental change in our ways of working. It makes little sense to slow down just because we cannot absorb the output at the pace it is generated.
We shouldn't sacrifice a better tomorrow just because we don't understand the solution. In non-critical areas it's common that understanding of the solution is not all that important. What matters is the efficiency of the work.
We need to change the paradigm. We are moving into era of evidence-based development. Instead of human review, we need solid frameworks which can provide proofs of the computer outputs. For math we have LEAN - for software development unit tests, vulnerability scanning, pen testing and accebility tests.
Most difficult are the areas where there are no hard truths to be said, like does pineapple belong to pizza? (it does.)
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u/Frosty-Meeting-1606 3h ago
This. I'm also a SWE and I can confirm that the hardest part now is to keep up with the volume of generated code. It's like you have to review five times what you had before. It's really having an impact the brain I must say.
I also love math and physics, and what I noticed is that you can create extremely helpful teaching materials. However, if the topics are difficult, even if the materials have great pedagogical value, it still takes time to digest it. Especially things meant for advanced math or physics. It feels like you can generate more quality material than you want to or even can digest
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u/Thin_Sky 1h ago
The person that figures this out is going to make a lot of money. Tbh I'm not sure it's even going to be a change in the way we work which solves it. It really might just be a bandwidth problem. Like, humans might continue to be the bottleneck until we either remove ourselves from the equation by finding a better alternative (which we haven't quite gotten there yet) or we have some neurolink type device that lets us "upload" understanding to our brains faster.
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u/ThomasKWW 2h ago
This is not how math works. Math is pure logic and must be 100% solid. Where it will be be applied, is hard to predict and maybe, nobody will ever notice any flaws in those proofs. But for instance, do you want to risk missing the target planet on our first interstellar flight because of an error in those proofs?
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u/TheRealDealMealSeal 1h ago
That's why I used the terms evidence and proof, not guesswork and maybe. I agree that proofs must be 100% bulletproof, and that's the whole argument. If we can formalize the proofs and build constructs that let us be certain a 10,000-page proof holds up, we can build new math on the facts that proof provides, without proofreading the proof (pun intended).
Or rather, the computer can build on top of it.
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u/CardboardScarecrow 2h ago
Jesus Christ why is ever AI bro so hellbent that AI must encroach on every single facet of life and human pursuits, AI comes for math and the discussion is not whether that's desirable or even how to best use AI for the advancement of math, no, the discussion is how math is going to contort itself to AI and get squeezed into settling for whatever scraps AI leaves untouched.
I'll also remind you that the AI technology you are so infatuated with was brought by the same human understanding you so flippantly dismiss.
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u/Turu42 2h ago
Because AI is going to do math better and faster than humans ever could. Humans don't need to understand all new math discoveries in this case, AI models will incorporate the results of AI model research and continue from there.
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u/CardboardScarecrow 2h ago
Sure, go ahead, do what you did elsewhere and fill arXiv with slop, set up a bot to upload dozens of papers per day then post on Reddit about how with your new workflow you've increased your productivity and now you prove dozens of theorems per day that no human will ever read.
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u/simmol 2h ago
But why does this bother you so much? Are you a mathematician? Like does this somehow negate your identity as a person and fill you up with dread and anxiety? Like what is it exactly?
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u/CardboardScarecrow 1h ago
I am not a mathematician nor do I have any hope to be, but I still think it's a noble pursuit and appreciate that we keep pushing forward our understanding of it.
Also a matter of empathy, what math is going through is the same as what has already happened in other fields (with varying effects) and will almost certainly happen in others, so I'm very leery of when one of these AI breakthroughs happen anywhere.
I'm not going to claim it's too pure not to speedrun vibe math in if doing so is going to have practical benefits in our daily lives, but that's not what neither I nor many important mathematicians are seeing.
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u/Soilblood 47m ago
Do you not see the problem with low skill idiots commissioning a machine to claim glory in a field for themselves despite not understanding at all how those results came to be? You want to give that guy credit over the ones who painstakingly prop up the field for the sake of human benefit whose works are exactly what LLMs needed to reach those conclusions? The world doesn't need more jerks fellating themselves over things they didn't actually do.
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u/Redducer 1m ago
There won’t be glory for the person who’ll prompt for P vs NP and get the first correct proof.
We might remember the model though.
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u/simmol 4h ago
So I am not even sure why it matters whether there are 400 mathematical proofs and/or 1 billion mathematical proofs generated by AI. If the goal is understanding them, then mathematicians can take their time in understanding them and go about it at the pace that they desire. I don't see how the fact that there more proofs out there hurts as it provides mathematicians more samples for comprehension.
All in all, all of this sounds pretty lame and they should just be honest with themselves. Their world is turned upside-down and now what counted as important in mathematics just became part of an automated process. So they lost their identity and their goals in research. What is with this ascension of "human comprehension" all of a sudden when at the end of the day, mathematicians are just butt-hurt and shocked at what has been happening? Just own it.
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u/Bladee___Enthusiast 4h ago
As someone who is currently in college getting my degree in mathematics and computer science i think it’s time for me to drop out and accept i’m gonna be working at wendy’s
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u/Wide_Egg_5814 50m ago
no you are not there are enough robotics development right now to automate Wendy's in the next next few months
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u/tragedy_strikes 4h ago
Nah, just make sure to not enter your working notes into an LLM being run on a server. OpenAI was been shown to have stolen the work for the NS proof from two math profs and offered to give one credit if he cut out the other cuz the colleague also worked for Anthropic and OpenAI didn't want that ruining their announcement. The one prof refused the offer and came forward to show what happened.
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u/ConstantinSpecter 2h ago
“OpenAI has been shown to have stolen the work […]” is simply untrue.
In a recent interview with Buckmaster, he said he doesn’t know for certain and only vaguely gestured at his suspicion that they might have looked at his chatlogs.
The only thing we know is that OpenAI started working on it after they learned that some mathematician is getting close to a solution. But the “OpenAI stole their work” trope is literally nothing but unsubstantiated speculation at this point.
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u/Webreader- 4h ago
If mathematicians have not been able to verify the proof, has any contribution been made? The AI contribution to NS is a rather marginal contribution to the problem, and these other proofs require verification to be of any value.
There is so much interest is dismissing the professional expertise of the same body of experts which developed the mathematics behind AI and all computer science. If mathematicians are good enough to make AI why are so many here so keen to dismiss their ability to judge it's output
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u/Efficient_Algae_4057 4h ago
It is almost a certainty that OAI verified the results using Lean verification. Even if a few of the proofs are wrong, there are hundreds of open-problems being solved and they would likely find a bug with the Lean kernel and fix it afterwards.
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u/Webreader- 4h ago
Where is the evidence for this? We're dealing with maths, not vibes. If the proofs have been verified, why is there no forthcoming evidence?
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u/Efficient_Algae_4057 4h ago
They paused releasing the results to consult with the group of advisors they assembled on how to best release the proofs. As for lean, they formalized their proof of NS, which tells you they had the ability to formalize something of that scale. I am pretty certain that as part of the their agentic workflow they have a verification loop using lean. They'll release the proofs within a few days and I am pretty sure they formalized them (at least internally) and they would claim the proofs are correct based on the lean verification passing.
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u/No_Berry_111 3h ago
If mathematicians have not been able to verify the proof, has any contribution been made?
Haha, mathematicians pivoting to philosophy
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u/brain-out-of-order 3h ago
Helping to make an automobile, rocket, or poison dart doesn’t mean one can or will outrun them.
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u/The_Scout1255 adult agi 2026 ASI <2030, prev agi 2024, ai personhood 2025 est 4h ago
constructive P=NP?
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u/niceuser45 4h ago
At this point, I would do a better job for OpenAI than their entire PR org (at least regarding math).
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u/MANvINFO 3h ago
already hearing people saying theyre just going to ignore the existence of any of them
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u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 3h ago
Are these mathematicians?
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u/omegahustle 3h ago
Do what we are doing in software development, put other machine to verify the work of the other machine
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u/Fun-Astronomer5311 3h ago
This is like Shinichi Mochizuki posting his proofs, and nobody could penetrate them.
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u/RabidHexley 2h ago
I feel like the task of interpreting hundreds of verifiable proofs to learn new science seems like it should be an academic goldmine. Like discovering thousands of ancient sumerian texts.
At the very least somewhat comparable to decades spent in the academic weeds not knowing if we'll ever solve something. There's just seems to be a reflexive opposition because of the source of the discovery.
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u/Apprehensive_Rub3897 1h ago
So we can't use AI to help us understand AI? I feel like I do that a lot. Obviously this guy knows a lot more than I do about this problem, but if it works... we're all living in some kind of blackbox of understanding/misunderstanding. It's difficult to be an expert in multiple facets even of the same discipline.
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u/Thin_Sky 1h ago
Why can't we use ai to digest and understand these results? I feel like that would actually be a really good litmus test for true agi.
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u/givemethepassword 1h ago
These proofs will be used by machines not humans. Math is over for humans. We have been passed by AI.
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u/Which-Preparation415 4h ago
Why aren't we also working on advancing AI to explain these proofs to us?
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u/drackemoor 4h ago
I matters not if humans would understand is. Ai would. And with the speed it evolves it's not going to be long.
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u/radioOCTAVE 4h ago
These mathematicians sure are a chatty bunch, at least when they feel threatened.
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u/MDInvesting 4h ago
‘Discovery’
Brute forcing solutions without mechanistic understanding that can be used elsewhere makes me feel like a whole bunch of gamers just put scope bots on the game of life.
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u/MasterOfBunnies 4h ago
Who's to say any of these proofs are correct? I could release one tomorrow that shows 2+2=69, but it'd mean absolutely shit.
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u/One_Improvement_6470 4h ago
Yeah, but they'll be correct and you'll still be a Luddite.
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u/MasterOfBunnies 4h ago
They could, but they could just as easily not. That's kind of the point of the tweet. Until they're comprehensible to us, they're both useless and unproven.
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u/rubberwings 3h ago
Look up how Lean verification works. That’s what we’re talking about here. They are proven/disproven and documented, we just don’t have the capacity to understand the output.
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u/HamiltonianCyclist 5m ago
they don't publish a proper lean verification most of the time. Quite famously now 1 of the initial 10 problems was totally false - as in the opposite was true to what they showed (the one aboute von Neuman algebras of property groups - so probably together with sofic groups the biggest one). But you don't hear about that in pr releases much...
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u/Old_Performer4257 3h ago edited 3h ago
At what point are we as a race going to accept that we can and will be surpassed in intelligence and that there is almost nothing in nature that makes us inherently special. (at least nothing that we can verify right now)
We are the smartest biological organism (that we know of so far) but it is not some physical law that we should be the ones understanding all of mathematics, or that we should be the ones discovering science. Nature just sees us as chemicals reacting together to make a biological machine that can grow and reproduce, nothing more and nothing less.
More and more proofs are coming that our top minds are going to be unable to comprehend as fast as AI does. And at some point, we need to begin to accept that, because these proofs are not just for us anymore. They are advancing AI, they are making the next generation of AI smarter, gaining them more and more knowledge. If understanding these proofs and engaging with them is something people get pleasure and fulfilment from then by all means go right ahead but do not expect AI to slow down for us so that you can discover it yourself.
Technological progress has brought huamnity so much abundance and convenience. It has exploded our population size, it has made us the dominant species and it will bring about another revolution. The death of our ego and the birth of a world with unimaginable benefits, resources and abundance.
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u/ResearcherOk4484 3h ago
What would differentiate us and ants or mosquitoes then? Even without AI, if we aren’t inherently special in some way, then sh**ting up a kindergarten is no different than spraying a wasp nest with wasp killer
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u/Old_Performer4257 2h ago
When I said there is almost nothing in nature that makes humanity inherently special, I was talking about cosmic or physical privilege, there is no known law of nature saying humans must be the most intelligent entities or the ones capable of discovering mathematics and science.
That doesn't mean there are no morally relevant differences between us and ants or mosquitoes. We have vastly different capacities for consciousness, suffering, self-awareness, relationships, long-term goals and so on, all of which can ground enormous differences in moral value without requiring us to believe humanity has some metaphysically privileged status.
So saying that my position implies shooting up a kindergarten is morally equivalent to destroying a wasp nest is a strawman. I never argued that all biological organisms are morally equivalent. My point is simply that, from the standpoint of physics and evolution, we're another product of nature rather than a species guaranteed to sit permanently at the top of the intellectual hierarchy
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u/omegahustle 3h ago
without religion, we are not really different than animals on a speck of dust in the universe
Just the smartest animal
And I'm not even religious or trying to favour religious views, just stating a fact
and yes this was perceived way before AI, just after darwinism and evolution got widely accepted
and to answer your question, is different because we as human society decided to uphold human primacy
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u/ResearcherOk4484 2h ago
The reason we’re different is because we’re enable to enact change outside of our natural programmed behavior unlike every other species on Earth. It’s the same reason why despite it maybe being unpopular to say to those with certain views like yours, someone like Newton or Einstein is/was worth the lives of hundreds of people due to their ability to enact change and push us forward. There is and always will be a hierarchy in everything: from different species to even in human society, and AI will never change that.
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u/CardboardScarecrow 3h ago
Technological progress has brought huamnity so much abundance and convenience. It has exploded our population size, it has made us the dominant species and it will bring about another revolution. The death of our ego and the birth of a world with unimaginable benefits, resources and abundance.
Why will this occur and why is it a good thing?
Before you answer, I'll point out that any answer that relies on human agency, values or morality automatically contradicts the rest of your post.
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u/Old_Performer4257 2h ago edited 2h ago
I don't think that second sentence follows. My post isn't arguing that human agency, values or morality don't exist. I said that humanity has no known natural privilege that guarantees we remain the most intelligent entities in existence.
Human values and agency can simply be properties that emerge from biological organisms like us (this can be proven otherwise and maybe we are inherently special then I will concede my argument).
Why do I think this may occur? Because technological capabilities have historically increased, and AI increasingly extends our ability to solve problems and automate intellectual work. Saying it definitely "will" happen was strong wording and I should have said this is my personal belief which I should have put in the original comment.
Why would I consider it good? Because I'm a human with human values. I value things like longer healthy lives, less suffering, greater abundance and greater freedom. I don't need the universe/nature itself to declare those things objectively good in order to prefer them.
I was arguing that humans aren't metaphysically special to nature but I did not say that human perspectives, agency and values can't exist or matter
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u/Soilblood 56m ago
Quit glazing the machine and telling people to surrender their autonomy over to it. Practical math needs to validated and understood before you go touting it as gospel and if we can't verify these proofs to be true and are asking to just accept the results of a probabilistic machine that is known to hallucinate and difficult to tell if it truly got something right then you are a menace to society that's bound to get people killed when any of these "proofs" fail at critical moments if they are even practical to begin with.
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u/Old_Performer4257 11m ago edited 6m ago
I never said we should surrender autonomy or treat AI output as gospel. Of course it should be verified, since AI can make mistakes, just like human research can (peer review has let plenty of incorrect conclusions through too).
My point was that if AI eventually does science and mathematics faster than humans can individually follow, we shouldn't expect progress to slow down simply so humans can personally re-derive every result.
And verification doesn't necessarily require a human to reproduce every step. Increasingly in maths, formal proofs can be machine-checked such as with lean, so it doesn't matter whether the proof was produced by a human or a model; what matters is whether it passes a rigorous verifier.
Practical science is obviously way more complicated, but the same general principle applies. We can build independent validation systems, automated replication and other forms of machin verification. Humans can then focus on auditing those validation systems, investigating failures and setting standards, rather than personally checking every individual result.
We should be investing in these systems now since evidently AI is moving much faster than we ever will
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u/kingjdin 4h ago
Mathematicians should be grateful that there will still be employment for them interpreting the AI proofs.
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u/Loud_Combination_635 4h ago edited 4h ago
Open AI's math is ugly. The math I used to code an entire universe doesn't contain any ugly symbols and its exact. I don't understand other peoples math, it doesn't make sense to me. The important thing is relationships, how things fit together.
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u/PineappleHairy4325 1h ago
Congrats. These [r/singularity](r/singularity) freaks are super cringe yet you managed to beat them.
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u/Loud_Combination_635 4h ago
Negative votes for me stating facts is a great representation of the insane state of the world we are in today; which is exactly what the good book says would happen.
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u/WoodwoodWoodward 3h ago
Talking about logic and math in the same hand as the "good book" doesn't make sense
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u/Loud_Combination_635 2h ago
Then you don't understand it.
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u/WoodwoodWoodward 2h ago
Enlighten me, because I clearly don't. No ai slop please 👍
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u/ImpossibleSeaweed869 4h ago
Put the reset in the bag