Why not use some of the money to develop open-weight, open-training-pipeline, fully introspectable and hackable LLM-based theorem proving assistants? Make them a commodity in every mathematician's office like other computational tools. Such a project would itself yield research topics.

> A non-zero amount of it is probably going directly to the AI companies through tokens...

Much the same way that VC money has been funnelled to Google and Meta through advertising budgets.

Isn’t the very pitch ai bros have to their investors: “we’ll replace ppl by tokens.”

If it doesn’t pay for non-permanent staff salary that would be sad for the maths ppl indeed.

OTOH I have a phd in th physics, 15+ y of academic senior researcher experience, now working 60+ h /w on an unpaid internship and using lunch money to pay for tokens.

And I’m by far not most unlucky

Edit: just to put things in perspective, my phd field (string theory) has 15-30M€ annual funding in Europe (per google)

While the contributing AI companies certainly have a lingering conflict of interest, the relevant point is the effort find a constructive way to live with the reality of AI?

Mathematicians are in the same boat as Silicon Valley programmers in the end: AI is doing their job better than them and cheaper. Other professions will join shortly.

The question then becomes, what do humans do? Resigning to die quietly is hardly the most favorable option?

Just because somebody else can do something better than you ever could doesn't make doing it superfluous. There is more to mathematics and software engineering than finding proofs and algorithms.

Do you consider yourself to be necessary? Like, for mankind? Probably not: you're just one of eight billion nearly-identical people, and if you vanish off the surface of the planet, the economic loss will be basically zero. Heck, if you're of retirement age, you're probably a net burden for the society.

But that doesn't sound like a good argument to ride off into the sunset, right? You probably enjoy living and it does make a difference in the lives of some close friends and relatives?

We don't organize societies around ruthless efficiency optimization, we organize them to be at least somewhat hospitable to humans and human enterprise.

Terrence Tao can't decide to keep the money and pay himself more or something though. He _has_ to spend it

If you're supposedly in the neighborhood of where this money could have trickled down to then there are likely alumni from your University at Anthropic, GDM, Meta, OpenAI, etc who could at least get you a referral for an internship. This is totally standard industry practice. Passing the interviews is up to you.

You can't use mathematics without understanding it?

Let's say GPT-23 Astra grinds away for a full month one day and out pops a warp drive. Our best physicists ask it to explain. The resulting stream of text is essentially incomprehensible. But, they build a scale model at its direction to test and sure enough it does the Kessel run in 12 parsecs.

Are you saying we shouldn't hop aboard the USS Enterprise and check out Alpha Centauri because we don't understand the math?

I think what's really happening here is that there's an ivory-tower academic class that feels entitled to make their living at public expense thinking about and writing about their topic of interest, and along comes a new tool that's changing that dynamic up. Meanwhile, in the real world, the value remains with people who can take whatever the tool of the day is and do useful things with it. Which, I think, is why despite all the talk the only professional job losses blamed on AI appear to largely be companies that had a failed strategy of some sort or another and used AI as a boogeyman to do the layoff that they needed to do anyway. To people living in the private sector this isn't seen as a dangerous invader, LLM's are productivity multipliers.

That seems wrong unless you have an unusual definition of "understanding":

* Lots of people use math for calculations without having proven any theorems.

* You can understand a mathematical statement without understanding or even having a proof. There are proofs built on the axiom of choice and conjectured results.

I think you can understand* math in general. I think not understanding something it's a matter of presentation. Also I think the presentation can be improved. A good-quality AI can do both, hence it can get a presentation that you can understand.

Yet this has zero utility (other than your own satisfaction). Once you understand something, you will likely not even do a better job at explaining it to someone else, so the utility is strictly limited to yourself.

So even ignoring ability to understand the problem is the cost/efficiency of understanding (and applying it).

I agree with your other statements, but I feel you're suggesting the non-sense is scoped to just math. It's not it's almost everything that we do (exceptions are social interactions including care taking, etc.)

So in this frame your "nonsense" is (almost) everything that we do. Personally I'd like to keep doing things.

Yeah, the tangibility of benefits really need to be felt, especially for the so called "deplorables" who would like to swing for a politician that can demonstrate that they will get them housing, healthcare, prosperity in their communities. High paying jobs across the educational ladder and in rural areas also wouldn't hurt.

The yet compressing into now is the definition of singularity. I'd argue that it's "only of limited use" if you don't understand the problem well enough - so yes, it's limited for predicting anything for most people but that doesn't make it an irrelevant aspect at predicting in general.

That why our ancestors repurposed their pitchforks. History is marked by a drive towards inequality, punctuated by bouts of war and revolution that trigger a reset.

This is the society capitalists want tho, they don't care about the wellbeing of humans they just care about profit.

Once the citizens are made obsolete, there is no need for healthcare, housing, or (human) infrastructure. Just electricity, cooling water, and Internet connectivity.

Obsolete citizens don’t need healthcare, housing or infrastructure. They will just die of hunger and exposure and then the rich and powerful can frolic unencumbered in paradise.

We are miles away from that.

Math proofs are right in the sweet spot for training LLMs with RLVR. It isn't some general "LLMs are getting insanely smart!". Even most software development itself is miles away from being as well suited to training as math proofs are.

The majority of math research is akin to professional chess. Completely useless and the folks doing it are using their giant brains to play a game that no one outside themselves benefits from.

That's how a lot of people were posting on this site back in the depths of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

First, they've been funding arXiv since 2011.

Second, the whole point of arXiv is open access. It didn't use to be this way. Research being disseminated as widely as possible is a good thing.

Also where people train from.

Read "the man who solved the market". It's a remarkable story. He was a remarkable dude, extremely smart, has given a lot of money to promote math and science.

Where "charitable" means: AI acceleration and removal of humans.

Big Math!!

Respectfully, you didn't answer either. Jim Simons was a brilliant mathematician, has done a lot for math and people involved in math. If you assume they are "pro math and pro math people", the why is simple too.

What is that the bottleneck for, though? Certainly, it's tautologically the bottleneck for "humans understanding math"; but what about things like using math to drive discoveries in other fields, or for practical work in CS, or applications elsewhere? I fear that practically those aren't bottlenecked on human understanding.

Putting asside the stolen research -

It is my understand that there isnt a lot of innovation here. Rather the (broad) field of mathematics got mined for solutions that already existed within the corpus.

It implies "We didn't know we already knew how to solve these problems". How is that a good look for mathematics as a field?

I’d say it’s understanding in general. We currently have zero evidence the AI models can understand mathematical breakthroughs in a productive way. (When they intuit a new technology or theory from a mathematical construct, we’ll be along that way.)

I completely reject the idea that releasing proofs is bad for the field of mathematics. Yes, it holistically changes the role for mathematicians, and they might not like where the change leaves them, but I do not think it harms the field overall.

Best I can tell the biggest complaints are really just that the future of their career is largely combing through lean and they don’t want to do that. Too bad. Adapt or get off the pot.

Mathematicians need to completely rethink the prestige paradigm. Counting proofs no longer works. That doesn’t mean there’s nowhere for them to go. Now it’s about gleaning human understanding from the lean. Maybe in the future LLMs can do that too and it’ll be all about formulating new conjectures.

> prompters who have no interest in the broader field itself once their initial target is "solved"

This applies to all fields and pursuits where AI is effective. Yes I think about this with regards to various things I’m working on.

This is just the nature of things, you need to adapt and not throw a tantrum like a child. You need to not behave like Terrance Tao who is essentially like a child in an adult’s body in terms of his behavior and lack of wisdom, and keep in mind he was a child prodigy so this isn’t a knock at all or statement about his intelligence, only his development as a man.

You can mourn, as I have for the field of programming as I knew it which I have loved since I was a child, but you need to move on.

I mean SoftBank was up 22% within a couple days of them announcing it. PR still changes investor sentiment.

> it's entirely up to humans to allow higher mathematical thought to stop happening

…yes. That’s why the human mathematicians are having this debate. How to keep the human mathematicians and their founders motivated to keep doing math, potentially more productively with these new tools.

> reprioritization of math would release a tremendous amount of human capital to do other more productive things other than posing yet another abstract puzzle which may or may not have an use in a few hundred years

We don’t know this! We might just have no more American mathematicians because folks who aren’t mathematicians don’t understand that we’re turning mathematical breakthroughs from just a couple decades ago into real, working technology.

> It's not even clear if the human race can survive until then

It’s pretty obviously clear the human race can survive for hundreds more years…

> It's not even clear if the human race can survive until then nor is it justified to spend that resource researching that far ahead instead of just when we need it.

"Climate change is going to kill everyone in 50 years so we'd better work fast if we want to burn all this coal by then"

> Wouldn't that be developers?

Not in the same extinction-class event way. In large part because hiring developers is still profitable.

Also, not remotely as well organized or proactive as mathematicians anpparently are. So maybe less vanguard than the cannon fodder at the front.

> Suggesting all the other are dummies?

In a sense, yes. There is no Simons Foundation for laid-off programmers. Taxi drivers and truckers, meanwhile, are really just trying to block change.

> wouldn't that make them the group that needs support the least?

I don't know. From a practical perspective, I am more confident the world will need mathematicians in 50 years than that it will need coders.

I don’t think it’s a matter of greed. I’d say it’s about incentives. In every field, people want to progress. I don’t think mathematicians are any different, even though we try to admire and idealize higher principles and the pursuit of knowledge. If you don’t publish papers under your name, you won’t progress in your career or receive enough support to work at the frontier. It’s just a general observation.

> greedy for status

It may be true in some cases but as a blanket condemnation of the entire field it makes no sense. Moreover, I can't fathom how you could reach this conclusion if you've actually done any reading on "the whole situation." The reality is precisely the opposite of what you're claiming.

Mathematicians are upset partly because AI companies are "scooping" their work. If you had worked on something for years and this happened, you'd be upset, too. The manner in which this happened with Navier-Stokes was unconscionable. The mathematicians who did the work deserve recognition. OpenAI deliberately stole it from them.

More importantly, the purpose of mathematics isn't to produce proofs. It's to produce mathematics and mathematicians. Working through problems helps people find new mathematics -- and makes people mathematicians. A machine that generates proofs destroys that. It breaks the cycle that makes mathematics fruitful, interesting, and not just self-regenerative but self-propagating.

AI companies aren't just clear-cutting the fields of math; they're sowing them with salt -- and they're doing this precisely because of greed and hunger for status and the title of "first."

> When you remove this greed and status seeking

I don’t necessarily disagree but it seems like the AI companies are just as status seeking and infinitely greedier.

> The whole situation seems completely grounded in that mathematicians are greedy for status and clout trying to write their name on new discoveries in blood and publish as many papers as possible

You're gonna get downvoted but this is absolutely true. People who've never been in real professional academia don't understand but this is exactly what most very successful academics are like.

> When you remove this greed and status seeking you might actually end up with a healthy environment.

Nah I think you're just gonna have collapse because you've removed all incentive.

> greedy for status

Perhaps to some maths is about progress, like other sciences, rather than self-portrayal

Unhinged and honestly nauseating take. Were you hurt by a mathematician at some point? I don't even know where to begin with how negative and backwards this is. I guess I could start by saying that if you replace "mathematicians" in your comment with literally any other profession you could make the same criticism about greed and clout. With the "writing their names in blood" comment, I have no words. I will weep for the world if it turns out that this is how people see math.

Maybe, but us forcing it on them is a much different thing.

How does one become a top X% of scientists without tokens?