A misalignment of AI in mathematics • Hacker News Board

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#751

Post by onetimeusename » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:31 AM UTC

NateEag wrote: post #463

onetimeusename wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the work the Mochizuki case generated can also be done by AI. AI could generate a landmark proof and then people could use it to solve or simplify intermediate problems and you could use a different AI prompt to try to disprove it if you were really skeptical. From my memory I think they said it took 88 hours to solve a Millenium Problem versus the decades of time humans have put into it. I don't like nuance here…

Tangent: > From my memory I think they said it took 88 hours to solve a Millenium Problem versus the decades of time humans have put into it. Keep in mind those ~88 hours were spread across ~10,000 simultaneous agent instances. So, roughly 880,000 hours of compute. Assuming a fifty-year career, and forty-hour workweeks, a human mathematician's career is about 100,000 hours of "compute". I suspect that with six good m…

ok I realize this is a tangent but you're saying my post is very misleading and then also saying that a human mathematician's career is about 100,000 hours of compute and that Navier-Stokes could've had a solution by now if not for perverse incentives. You may be right but I don't think this is a great argument because in a year I would bet that those numbers change since computing power tends to increase or get cheaper over time. So I am taking the stance AI can outdo people if not now, perhaps soon.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#752

Post by afiodorov » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:34 AM UTC

pks016 wrote: post #665

I never expected this many people (on this thread) arguing semantics and what not. I know that not everyone has morality and ethics, but I didn't realize it was this bad. I'm afraid of the ripple effect of the agenda pushed by AI companies will have. In future and even now, they say AI has significantly progressed math and scientific research in general. There is truth to this, but the narrative has done more damage…

I used to be a PhD student more than a decade ago, and I published a paper containing a solution to an open problem. Yet shortly after my first publication I became increasingly disillusioned, because I started to think that within my lifetime AI would reach and eventually surpass my ability to solve such problems—and that we only had a decade or two left.

So I started saying that it only made sense to focus on problems whose solutions would be useful immediately. I even emailed my supervisor about it, arguing that our efforts were “pointless” in the sense that AI-related problems were much more pertinent and had to be prioritised.

My supervisor thought I was bonkers. I still have the email, though. Quoting myself from April 2015:

> By 2030-2040 we will have enough computing power to simulate a human brain neuron by neuron. Once we manage to create a human intelligence we will be one little step away from super intelligence: just set the intelligence to modify itself and see the exponential growth in action. Our human intelligence is bounded by a number of biological factors (e.g. size of a skull) and even the smart human who has ever lived will appear to be a primitive ant to a supper intelligence (machine intelligence will also have perfect motivation). There is plenty of literature on this if you are interested in discussing this further. > > What does it have to do with research in pure maths? I can say that research in pure maths which won't come handy in the next 60 years is just wasted effort. The super intelligence will be able to do maths way better than humans. I believe a lot of current efforts should go into researching of artificial intelligence (or areas to do with AI) instead rather than the pure maths. I want to be proven wrong but most mathematicians I interact with are too narrow-minded to counter me and they just laugh about even contemplating the above. Frankly I am myself so perplexed that I take the above seriously, but I do and it's hurting my motivation.

I'm quite curious what my supervisor thinks of that email now.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#753

Post by pseudotensor » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:34 AM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #735

pseudotensor wrote: post #733

Job protectionism for elite mathematicians under guise of caring about student development. The glory of the super smart math person will need to shift to more creative modes, just like art had to handle photography. Attribution is legitimate issue but should not stall progress as it is easy to address via the same research mechanisms that agents already do.

> Job protectionism for elite mathematicians under guise of caring about student development. Huh. Weird. This hasn't been my take of mathematicians at all. The dozens I know are quite humble and dedicated to math and the beauty one finds in it.

"guise" doesn't mean they don't care. It means they are shadowing their concerns when in reality they have concerns primarily about what AI will do to their success in math and the credit they will receive in the rest of their lifetime -- i.e. their legacy.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#754

Post by redox99 » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:36 AM UTC

ekidd wrote: post #720

redox99 wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many graduate students (I know) are having a crisis if any of their research worth it? If AI can (or will) do everything, what's the point of doing experiments and all? This will eventually deter a whole generation of curious minded students from research. Those who think it's me or the machine will fail. Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed.

> Those who think it's me or the machine will fail. > Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed. This is only true up until a point. If I treat a mid-sized model (say, Qwen3.8 Flash Next) like a pair programmer, then yes, it accelerates my work. But I can already see the next stage with Fable: If I give it a couple of paragraphs of spec and $50, then I can just leave…

Of course you're not going to get rich with the kind of software that LLMs can one shot these days. But that kind of software like to-do lists or basic CRUD have been saturated for over a decade, way before LLMs. People overestimate how much you can one shot, yeah a good prompt can get you 90% there but that 10% remaining often takes months of extra work.

Software has always progressed this way, lots of devs back then would work on business websites that have been 99% replaced by wordpress, squarespace and instagram.

I'm sure it's the same with research, you're going to tackle problems that would have not been worth the effort or outright impossible without AI. The old stuff that you'd work for months, yeah that's going to be a prompt away.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#755

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:38 AM UTC

pks016 wrote: post #665

I never expected this many people (on this thread) arguing semantics and what not. I know that not everyone has morality and ethics, but I didn't realize it was this bad. I'm afraid of the ripple effect of the agenda pushed by AI companies will have. In future and even now, they say AI has significantly progressed math and scientific research in general. There is truth to this, but the narrative has done more damage…

I commented something similar on a bunch of other posts. The thing that scares me about a lot of the AI community in general is that their utopia is basically more frightening to me than their doom scenarios. They present this "incredible abundance" as the ultimate human endgame, but I agree, when we all end up like the humans in Wall-E, what's the purpose of it all?

And then to get retorts of "it's just just rich techies that want to find 'meaning' in their jobs while millions starve in the third world". Why would we expect the most wealth concentrating technology in history to lead to mass benefits for those in the 3rd world?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#756

Post by yieldcrv » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:39 AM UTC

valegrete wrote: post #678

yieldcrv wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different person here, I read the article and they are all wrong. Hope that helps. Okay, to elaborate, substantively, their point is that the people using these AI models are not doing it for the love of the game, but for marketing. And instead of them - and nobody - spending millions of dollars to solve the problem, successfully, they want every problem of their academic industry to persist because even though they…

Mathematical breakthroughs with commercial relevance are few and far between, and often depend on dusting off old results which were, at the time of discovery, "solutions nobody asked for." The NS counterxample is actually, by any market measure, a "problem nobody asked for" in the sense that its existence doesn't have any commercial relevance (beyond juicing OpenAI's IPO). So the only long-term value solving it coul…

What irks me is the ego

My stance is that solving the problem is aligned with humankind

the rest is just hypothesizing a way that academics fit in this world at all

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#757

Post by pseudotensor » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:41 AM UTC

blharr wrote: post #570

woopsn wrote: post #531

My interpretation is they don't care about scooping mathematicians they were just trying to scoop a competitor. They had a short window in which to complicate Anthropic's priority, when Anthropic announced be able to say "ok nice but we did that too". Upon realizing they'd misunderstood, incredibly they said to this academic (who did not resolve NS) okay well just go ahead and claim the prize, so long as you're not A…

>they weren't trying to scoop a mathematician they were just trying to scoop a competitor Well. Obviously, yes. But in doing so they still DID scoop out a mathematician in a very unethical way. In doing so they showed that they basically have a huge gun they can point at X work you care about and develop, and can cut you across the finish line. And take credit for it. Obviously this already _existed_, but is just muc…

This is "just" an attribution and credit assignment problem. OpenAI could have done vastly better than they did at attribution. They should have spent another $10M just on attribution/credit research to annotate the contributions to the lean and paper and their blog.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#758

Post by AndrewKemendo » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:42 AM UTC

redox99 wrote: post #741

trimbo wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed. Yes, but, in the last week we saw an AI lab front-run[1] the research of mathematicians doing what you suggest. The lab threw something like $15M of compute at a problem and the researchers were able to spend nowhere near that. I think the authors are more concerned about that kind of asymmetry and race to publish the resu…

This has always happened, way before AI. You'd spend months or years building and growing your business, and then Google would release a feature or product that would kill your business overnight because they can throw way more money at the problem, plus their branding. That's life.

I got Sherlocked hard and it’s one of those things that when you realize it’s happening there’s nothing you can do you just gotta sit back and take it

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#759

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:42 AM UTC

ndriscoll wrote: post #721

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's valuable for you , the person who's going to spend a bunch of deep design effort, to make POCs. Is it valuable for someone else to drive by, dump some POCs on your lap, and then leave you to do the deep design effort while they run away to study AI? If that person then runs around telling people that they're the real author of your project, because they generated the original POC, would you consider that an accu…

Your analogy is far enough away from the way that the real world works that I'm not sure that I can really even strain my experiences to fit within it. Sure, I guess that would be annoying? But mathematicians define their field. They're smart people. They're capable of recognizing when someone just did a vibecoded throwaway PoC and when someone has a well structured proof. Actually even before LLMs they'd publish new…

It's a real example that's happened to me twice in the past year, so I'm not sure what to make of the idea that it's far away from how the real world works.

I'm also not sure I understand what you're objecting to if we agree that mathematicians define their field. The source link is a declaration from 25 Fields Medallists with precisely that goal. They believe/define/declare that the type of AI-generated proofs we've seen are vibecoded throwaway PoCs; they feel that a well-structured proof must include factors such as "a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others", and the success criterion is not a true/false conclusion but rather "development and integration into the mathematical canon".

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#760

Post by noslenwerdna » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:46 AM UTC

lll-o-lll wrote: post #528

dhbradshaw wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are both big motivations but not the only ones. But there's still play. There's still curiosity. And there's still the drive to understand something for yourself.

> But there's still play. There's still curiosity. And there's still the drive to understand something for yourself. Yes, but think about what that implies if those are the only motivations left. Gone are the professions. Gone are the ambitious. There is plenty of space for people to work on intellectual pleasure pursuits (as there is with art and music), but the death of all intellectual based industries is still so…

Good? Those people were in the field for the wrong reasons. No reason to mourn them leaving