alt Hacker NewsI just watched Primeagen’s video on this and Tao’s point is that juniors no longer have the path of solving a proof to earn Field’s medals. He also argues that the community part is being hurt by AI discovering proofs because in the past people used to get invite to talk and collaborate. Now all that is being taken away. The community must adapt because Pandora’s box cannot be closed.
Prime also mentioned that software development is different. In Software development, the product is what you’re building towards, so the means to get there can be disrupted without the industry being cannibalized.
In math research, the process is the product. You take away the researching part and not much is left. But my question is, these math proofs OpenAI released, will math shift to actually using the proofs to change the world instead of just finding new ones?
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Our industry is equally cannibalised, anyone that thinks otherwise is either having too many tokens or in a privileged position.
If business can deliver the same product with a smaller team, great!
And yes this has been happening for a while, even if not everywhere.
In enterprise consulting, projects that would require a team of 20 devs on average, now have about 5.
Moving away from on-prem, managing own cloud infra to managed containers, to serverless, SaaS and iPaaS ready made products, and offshoring naturally.
All contributed to ever decreasing team sizes.
Now AI based tooling is added to that cocktail, reducing even further the team sizes.
The only folks doing well in the end, are the employees of AI companies, without moral issues contributing to the industry downfall, because the CEO themselves aren't the ones coding and pirating human culture.
Primeagen is a youtube reaction guy. You may as well tell me what hbomberguy, Jay Leno, or Ben Shapiro had to say about it.
> Tao’s point is that juniors no longer have the path of solving a proof to earn Field’s medals.
This is a "you" problem for the math establishment, not a problem for the AI companies.