The main fear seems to be that if mathematics is done at this speed and in this way, humanity will lose its intuition for doing mathematics.
A misalignment of AI in mathematics
481–490 of 635 posts
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#482As a mathematician maybe I am a little more optimistic than this declaration. I am thinking of Mochizuki's abc conjecture: He worked in relative isolation, and dumped a huge incomprehensible proof on the community (to oversimplify a bit). That's not totally unlike what might happen if AI generates a huge, incomprehensible proof of let's say RH. Well, what is the result? In the Mochizuki case, it was a lot of skeptici…
>Maybe mathematics just becomes a little more like other fields--relying on labs with lots of money for compute, digging through a corpus of AI-generated proofs, etc. Dr. Tao said the same thing. Somehow, this letter came through. He wants to conduct Math competitions where participants who don’t have formal credentials can contribute to mathematical research through AI. Title: Terence Tao - SAIR Competitions and the…
>Dr. Tao
Professor Tao.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#483Touché… In short you still need the humans to understand what’s going on at the end of the day whether it’s a mathematical equation or source code for a computer program relying upon mindless AI isn’t good enough. Humans still have to do the thinking or is it in the brave new world the error checking at the end of the day?
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#484> We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work, with misalignment between the outcome of the use of AI and its initial purpose. In many fields and activities, years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas. However, building on a vast body of previous human work, AI systems are…
It's not about job security. It's about the social and intellectual practice of the discipline.
The threat to mathematics isn't that suddenly the profitability of their profession (lol) is going to go away, it's that people are thinking of AI as a replacement for the human social and intellectual practices that constitute the discipline.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#485As I understand the article, its title should be: "A Severe Misalignment of AI Frontier Companies with Ethics."
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#486> We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work
This is the crux of it and goes far beyond Mathematics or Computer Science. To get a bunch of humans to do anything, you have to motivate them. Kleos and Timē; renown and stuff. These AI companies threaten to rip this away from everyone but themselves, and this recent millennium prize is the perfect example.
Solving this problem as a human would have led to tremendous Kleos; my name would be written in the annals of mathematics, lecture tours of praise were mine to be had for the rest of my days. This one victory would have earned my recognition throughout history. The greatest a mortal may hope for. Ripped away.
It would also have given me great Timē. The prize money, the professorships, the book deals. Gone.
If all hope of “renown and stuff” in the intellectual realm is now taken by the AI companies, they will remove all human motivation to pursue these endeavours.
Perhaps the glory will come from slaying these fell beasts.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#487Tao's critique of AI in the field of mathematics reminds me of what French art critic Charles Baudelaire said in the 19th century about photography [0]. Baudelaire argued that photography became a haven for failed painters, the sorts of hacks that could not finish proper training. Photography, as a mechanical rendering of the world, could only record what already existed; it couldn't transform reality the way a paint…
We can start having a meaningful discussion when people use real reasoning instead of analogy.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But complaining about the dawn of a new era of advancements seems counterproductive. you completely misunderstood the critics. your analogy is awful. this is much closer to the industrial revolution in the uk: it brought a lot of progress, but also extreme inequality and concentration of power.
I am very specifically addressing what I have read Terrence Tao say on AI and mathematics, as that is the subject of this submission. Are we on the same page?
It's not about whether the conjectures themselves are interesting or not, or whether people simply have enough time. It's that a bare proof made by a machine doesn't actually do much for us. There is not some set of problems that, once finished, will amount to some kind of final, correct system and we can call it a day and, like, utilize it. "Mathematics" is the people doing it (the "mathematical community" Tao references below). This other stuff is kinda just.. expensive exercises to render a result. They are only actually beneficial to us insofar as they exist in a context of research among peers.
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/a-severe-misalignm...
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
So let’s say OpenAI cure cancer and put every cancer researcher out of work depriving them of intellectual satisfaction, this would also be a problem? It would certainly impact the field. The fact is these fields are supported by society because of the benefits to everyone else. Once the same results can be achieved in a cheaper and faster way that is what will be done. We should mourn this in the same way we do bugg…
> The fact is these fields are supported by society because of the benefits to everyone else. Once the same results can be achieved in a cheaper and faster way that is what will be done. Maybe it's worth double checking that you know how these fields benefit everyone else? Proving the blowup of the Navier Stokes equations in 3D isn't going to make your gas cheaper or make harvesting food easier or make drones easier…
Math people absolutely are important to things like the SpaceX landing control systems, hypersonic gliders, 5G networks and so on.
If you can make breakthroughs on such areas as fluid dynamics, control theory or information theory with AI then that absolutely is a big deal with real technological implications.
Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
The statement is not about AI but about the behaviour of AI companies. OpenAI have put vast resource into solving open maths problems: many millions of dollars of compute just on the Navier-Stokes result, plus whatever they spent on the broader Millenium Prize problems initiative and the other results they have published. Anthropic are doing the same. The statement is asking them to stop doing this. AI companies are…
What do we do about the problems that don't require many millions of dollars in resources? Last weekend I spun up a small agent swarm and pointed it at a field of math I have some affinity towards. Within four hours I had settled three conjectures, one of which is rather famous (for the field, not in general). It cost me about four hundred dollars. I am at a loss about what to do with these results. On one hand I fee…
> I am at a loss about what to do with these results.
I would recommend publishing them to Palomar (https://palomar-registry.org/) - I have no affiliation, this is an online registry of Lean-verified proofs created by Terrence Tao.
I have submitted a proof there that's also minorly important in an extremely niche field.
Anyway, I feel like it's a good place to dump AI slop lean proofs because the main point of the registry is that it verifies that: 1) your Lean challenge statement is the same as what you informally state you're trying to prove; 2) your Lean proof actually compiles.
This could be useful to future AI slop researchers who want to know if a given result has already been formalized, and they may be able to mine some lemmas from your work. Also, it's good to know for the field in general what has been proven.
I'm fairly certain you can set your publishing name to be whatever you want, so you could set it to be just the word "Anonymous", or the name of the model you used.