alt Hacker NewsThis is my hypothesis too. I work with LLMs daily. I use frontier models all the time, and I work in a startup that trains its own special-purpose models. At no point in the course of my work do I see anything resembling superhuman intelligence. I see superhuman stupidity, ie. stupidity so extreme that it exceeds what any human is capable of by orders of magnitude. So where are the superhuman math results coming from? Simple: translation. I've already thought this for a long time, that math is an obsfucated field and that programming already makes it far simpler to understand. So you train a machine to throw tons of compute at translating math into programming, and blow the field out of the water because it's effectively been deobfuscated. Math proofs had a sort of security by obscurity; they were not genuinely supremely difficult, but rather very few people worldwide worked on them and their work was heavily obscured, so the great deobfuscation machine comes along and trivialises that aspect and suddenly the facade crumbles. I think all of this could have been achieved a long time ago had humans done the deobfuscation, but there wasn't sufficient programming <--> maths cross-domain expertise or financial incentive to develop it.
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yes, I couldn't agree more, if like to add that "the industry" drove programming and maths apart:
computer science, or "Informatik/informatique" how some Europeans call it, was a branch of mathematics, and "the industry" pushed _very_ hard to get it "practical", make colleges and universities produce programmers, not computer scientists.
so they removed all "challenging" maths requirements from the curriculum, and you can graduate with much less formal rigour, and certainly without being a matematician.
that's also how python replaced scheme as a first teaching language.
I am really curious how far you went in math, because you seem incredibly ill-informed.
This is not at all what mathematitians are saying. They say LLMs obfuscate proofs even more. Saying that mathematitians obscure proofs is nonsense. Maths requieres a big effort from the brain to be deobfuscated as you say, and deobfuscating maths requires understanding, which takes even longer. Thats why textbooks dont exist just after a new proof appears, it takes some time to digest it and identify the key parts.
Maths is a language, and learning a language takes time. Its like if I say that japanese made an effort to obfuscate their language just because i cannot read it or read it as fast as english.
LLMs are autimating some part of maths which is formal manipulation. It happens that computers are much better than humans at formal manipulation. In the same way that computers are much better at mathematical computations. That is the huge change in the field. But any working mathematitian can tell you that formal manipulation is just part of the research job.
The powerfull thing about maths is that formal manipulation has allowed humans to go further "for free": you just need to understand the foundations, and the formal system allows you to compute new results for free without needing to reunderstand them.