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ltbarcly3today at 9:40 PM1 replyview on HN

I think he's suffering from a sort of static-universe fallacy. People aren't going to keep doing what they are doing, but secretly.

What is going to happen is a complete revaluation of things like "finding a counter example to a famous problem". Even if someone finds a solution to a problem like this with pencil and paper, nobody will believe it, and they will assume that there was an AI involved.

Further, sitting and doing math with a pencil and paper will no longer be a reasonable strategy to build a reputation or career, beyond the benefit a mathematician gains to their own intuition and skill. People who work hard to build intuition and also use AI effectively will dominate the field.

In a world where everyone is using AI, the open problems that remain will be the ones that are AI resistant. This is no different that how things work now, mathematicians wait until they are fairly confident someone won't rapidly solve their problem before they start talking about it. They will do the same thing in the future, except in the future AI will be part of the toolset they use decide if they are ready to share yet or not.

Edit: Ok I believe I was generally right here, but I just read the details of what OpenAI did. They didn't solve a longstanding problem, they got tipped off to an approach a mathematician was using and would likely result in the solution very soon and they finished it first. If this turns out to be true I think my take above is not correct, in the short term people will have to stop sharing updates because otherwise openai will dishonestly race to finish their work.


Replies

dev_dan_2today at 10:04 PM

> If this turns out to be true I think my take above is not correct, in the short term people will have to stop sharing updates because otherwise openai will dishonestly race to finish their work.

Which I don't see a reason for Anthropic and "Open"AI not to, given their not so stellar track record with IP of individuals/entities-that-are-not-rich-enough ;)