I think in the long run mathematicians are probably fucked, but in the short run it's not that bad. All three of the big conjectures solved the answers were at the level where if you had given a grad student the questions and the right background reading there's a good chance they would have solved it. (This example, you could have given an undergraduate good at programming and computer algebra and told them to come up with a counterexample.)
At this point the advantage of AI is that it's read the entire mathematical literature, and it doesn't have to worry about wasting its time. The solved problems have all turned out to be surprisingly easy, so the real lesson is that we're bad at judging how hard problems are.
Assuming this state of affairs lasts, the medium-term problem is that you learn something when struggling with a problem, even if you don't solve it, and if mathematicians become too reliant on AI the skills they develop through struggle will erode.
The long-term problem, of course, is that it seems much more probable that a future model will make mathematicians all obsolete. But so far Fable hasn't. (Anthropic has probably burned a billion tokens on the Riemann hypothesis already, without telling anyone.)
> This example, you could have given an undergraduate good at programming and computer algebra and told them to come up with a counterexample
please try go try it. There's no way someone didn't do massive computer algebra searches before today.
> All three of the big conjectures solved the answers were at the level where if you had given a grad student the questions and the right background reading there's a good chance they would have solved it.
You cannot be serious... why didn't they solve it before then? Do you think no one tried it? What background do you give the double cycle conjecture student after the flow reduction? a linear algebra textbook???