It’s been an interesting few weeks for counterexamples. This post is basically my perspective of what has been going on in the world of form
Even though Terry Tao has been saying for months that "AI in mathematics is the real deal", it was a little slow to percolate. But now that Fable and Sol are out, several big AI results were delivered on back-to-back days and it seems like math is about to have its own Claude Code moment where the whole field collectively realizes over a period of days that the game has changed. My condolences to them, it's kind of traumatizing but hopefully you come out the other side intact. Some people do, I'm still not sure if I'm one of them.
What are we really doing?
This is what I mean by "traumatizing". Either you get through this phase or you don't but we should probably have a plan for what to do if this happens to the entire economy all at once instead of one profession at a time.
it's an interesting exercise to imagine an article like this about something like medicine
I… man. I hope that author figures out how to live in a world with other people. LLMs speed it up but the problem of “what if someone scoops me” is not _new_ in science.
@kata4a because in both medical research and medical practice the ethical utility of “improved medicine” is so dramatically outweighing “but I wanted to be the one to do it!” ?
Yeah I can't relate to this mindset at all. The point of science is to increase humanity's understanding of the world, not about satisfying the scientist's ego. These problems being easier to solve now is a good thing.
my personal $0.02 is that i think the framing is profoundly myopic in a way that other people above me have pointed out but also in the much more narrow case;
There is something about mathematical discovery (progress, advancement, creation) which is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical. That admission may come as a surprise to some non-mathematicians. But I would be willing to bet that for any mathematician reading this, what I have said above is quite prosaic—whether or not it accords with their personal experience of mathematics. Here is a brief gesture at the full sweep of mathematical mystics and dreamers: Ramanujan, Grothendieck, Cantor, Pascal, Luzin, Leibniz and possibly you, or someone you know. Other aspects of practicing math (such as learning long-established theory) can also afford encounters with the sublime.
i just personally find it galling that a mathematician cannot understand what could so possibly be sublime about the LLM as a spiritual object. they are right - i do find mathematics sublime. i find statistics sublime. the large language model is not adjacent to or perpendicular to math, it is, to me, math, it is math at its most exquisite - that if you analyze enough things, numerically, at some point this analysis takes on a life of its own and can answer questions for you with a mouth the way the graph of a chart answers questions for you with your own eyes and brain.
the other objections are good - frankly, better - but this is just the thing that stuck out to me as i was reading as personally offensive. if the idea that a vector representation of all of human language and cultural content somehow produces an emergent phenomenon Sort Of Like A """Conscious Being""" doesn't make you believe in G-d and miracles, i don't know what will! your sublime is not more important than mine just because you don't like what i'm studying.
