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izzydata • today at 2:17 PM • 5 replies • view on HN

I still think mathematicians are going to be as important as ever. The LLMs are only finding what was technically possible given our current breadth of knowledge after brute force solving problems. Eventually it will run out of things that it can do with its training and the only way to get it to do more will be training it on new human found knowledge.

Finding that new knowledge may be exponentially more difficult, but it will be much more valuable.


Replies

FabHK • today at 2:32 PM

> Eventually it will run out of things that it can do with its training and the only way to get it to do more will be training it on new human found knowledge.

How do you know this?

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none_to_remain • today at 3:54 PM

I liked reading an essay by mathematician Nestor Guillen that develops thoughts along these lines - the "convex hull of ideas".

https://birdsnfrogs.github.io/2026/09/12/Felix_qui_potuit_re...

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antves • today at 2:21 PM

this is assuming that humans can be original in ways llms won't be, which I doubt will hold true

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d0liver • today at 2:26 PM

Came here to say this. What AI is doing with math is essentially fuzzing, but looking for valid inputs that solve a problem and the inputs are mathematical abstractions. It's a cool approach, but AI doesn't understand what's going on, and without understanding it won't be able to create the next generation of mathematical abstractions needed for the next generation of proofs.

fantasizr • today at 2:26 PM

aren't mathematicians needed to create the problems? Everything solved so far is a question posed by a human. Which is probably why cracking diseases is more difficult (apart from man made viruses :/)