alt Hacker News> On the other hand, none of the proofs so far seem to contain “alien ideas,” a move-37, or completely novel arguments or new concepts that were not present in the literature in some form or another.
I have the same optimism as Prof Tao. That said, I can understand why so many mathematicians have been so upset or stressed out. It turned out much of the mathematical work is about clever combination of existing methods - this already requires enormous amount human ingenuity and years of dedicated learning. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, AI can be very good at knowledge transfer and finding combination of existing ideas to solve seemingly impossible problems. Even though mathematicians are extremely smart and capable, only a small number of them are capable of truly inventing "alien ideas", discovering new ground-breaking mathematical structures, or coming up with new problem-solving techniques. That is, AI can eat many mathematicians' cake. That said, I'm still hopeful. Mathematicians still understand mathematics deeply. If someone can prompt AI to solve an important problem, that person is more likely a good mathematician than an average joe like me. So, I think mathematicians do have a bright future: leverage AI, and make more and bigger math discoveries. It's still the same north star: we must know, and we shall know. It's just that with AI, we will know sooner and more.
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It's pretty much the same story with software development. There are two camps and the bigger camp got hit hard. Nowadays I feel entitled to use the "software engineer" title. Essentially, all the decisions-making and nuanced trade-offs which AI is not capable of making; that's engineering. AI can only do programming and code analysis... At least so far.
That said, in the past couple of month, AI has gained a lot of ground on the 'project management' front in terms of planning capability for a lot of simple to medium-complexity projects. It still needs a lot of help for more complex projects. Just today, it almost fooled me into making a major structural mistake but thankfully I asked the right question and saved myself a lot of future problems; it was essentially dancing around a critical point and giving me the illusion that the critical point had been addressed but only when I phrased my question in a particular way, I understood the core issue was not addressed.
> I have the same optimism as Prof Tao.
This is not written by Tao, but by Álvaro Lozano-Robledo.