Yes, and they will. But what's happening here is that the system that cultivates mathematics (and mathematicians) is recieving likely the biggest shock of its history. How do you reward merit and identify talen when people can't absorb the number of proofs being generated, much less understand them? Perleman's proof of the Poincare conjecture took several years for the mathematical community to digest; the proof of Navier-Stokes will probably take a similarly long time. In the mean time, it looks like all open problems will be solved (or proved that they can't be solved).

It's not that the horizon is expanding because of this. It's more like a forest getting clear-cut.

It's possible but the approaches these tools take are usually verbose and strange. Think about it like anything else llms do. Even when the picture is right and there are only 5 digits on each hand all the textures are off and so is the lighting and postures. Or in code, the code is always way larger then it needs to be and tightened up strangely with weird loose ends. Or in writing weird idioms, words, structure, and a weaselly way to turn 3 sentences into 8 paragraphs.

People usually use these tools in math and science to find an answer. Then often they will work it back using more sane or human pathways. So it's shareable or even beautiful.

Knowing the answer has value. But, often in math the best thing was how someone got there.

Pure math is practiced mostly for the intellectual thrills and recognition among a very small group of peers. There's little else to it. You don't become rich, you don't become a celebrity. You teach students, write papers, and probably know most other people who work in the same subfield as you. Tao is a sort of a celebrity of the quarter on HN, but I promise you that outside this forum, almost no one has ever heard of him.

If you take that away and turn math into a less fulfilling pursuit where you mostly try to make sense of the output of an LLM, and it's "Astra's theorem #18398" and not "John Doe's last theorem", I'd wager that far fewer people will have any interest in the field.

This is really not unique to math, by the way. AI is undermining a lot of creative work. Why blog when you have much better odds of making it to the top of HN with autogenerated blog-slop? Why write books when many nonfiction categories on Amazon are now dominated by AI? The list goes on.

There's plenty of people on HN who think it's nothing new, ignoring the huge change in scale. And those who think this is good because there's no inherent value to human creativity if we can get the same content faster and for less. I disagree.

Well no because it works by joining together existing novel insights.