alt Hacker NewsIt seems that in a frantic pace to prove general usefulness of these LLMs the AI companies are also picking up the role of traditional scientific researchers without really have enough proper communication with the scientific community at large... I agree putting tools in the actual scientists will be very helpful but do they have the patience waiting or even parsing their feedback?
Sure - the AI companies want some quick trophy kills to feature in their IPO prospectus, but they are not going to themselves be cracking the genuinely tough problems.
There is a difference between what's easy/hard for a human vs computer, and LLMs haven't changed that. You might expect a computer to be good at tasks requiring prodigious memory and compute, and it turns out that some of these long-standing math problems are of that nature - not requiring new breakthroughs but rather just massive exploration of what is already known and what they were trained on.
There will no doubt be more math results like this, but presumably also ones that are "hard for a human, easy for a computer", requiring massive search (e.g. find an example/counter-example cf Navier-Stokes & Jacobian conjecture) rather than creativity.