alt Hacker NewsPhD student in math here. Doing LLM math is soulless and takes most of the fun out of solving difficult problems (for the most part - my opinion only, I'm happy to talk to mathematicians who like this kind of work). But ultimately the public funds us to produce and understand as many mathematical results as possible for downstream use (if you ask OpenAI/Anthropic, to cure cancer). In that case it doesn't matter who figures a result whether it be a human, LLM, or dog.
So what are we to do? Follow our duty to the community and the public, which is to produce as many results as possible? Or to follow our duty to ourselves and enjoy and understand what we are doing? To someone like me those things seem to be incorrigably opposed to each other now. At this pint the only option is to quit and find a new domain where human input in problem solving is still necessary.
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I suspect that the mathematicians who adapt best to AI will treat it like astronomers treat a telescope, as a source of possibly-interesting data to be analyzed. Maybe it looks like finished output, but that doesn’t mean it’s ready to show.
please do not quit
I would suggest that hardly anyone in the public is asking you to increase efficiency. That is the argument you read on pro-AI VC forums and Reddit.
In other words, it is a made-up argument. I think some mathematicians are either addicted (Feynman disease) or hope to make a breakthrough and somehow get credit. So they use "the public" to justify their habit.
The real public that is not on these forums wants academic freedom and independence from corporations. Both will suffer if you are entering soulless production pipelines.