A misalignment of AI in mathematics • Hacker News Board

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#931

Post by HDThoreaun » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

GPerson wrote: post #924

looofooo0 wrote: post #888

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soon AI mathematics will be 10x or 100x or 1000x more productive than humans in the proofing theorems business. Mathematics of old style is dead, they should develop ideas how to deal with that as a math community.

> But solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight. Forgetting this in the world of AI may turn the tool against the primary goal.

No one is paying mathematicians to develop a conceptual understanding. If the signal for who is “winning” math in academia disappears mathematicians will have a big problem

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#932

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

redox99 wrote: post #703

ekidd wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

I hope it remains this way then.

I am finding it still takes awhile to get my apps to a happy place with AI. Not because the AI is bad but because i have to sit with it for awhile. Figure out what's working, what isn't, what's missing, what turned out to be kind of useless and in the way.

As a different article said, we still need taste.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#933

Post by ex-aws-dude » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 4:33 PM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #901

ex-aws-dude wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s something I don’t see much discussion about They spent millions to solve this problem but it’s not like someone is going to pay that for every problem Won’t progress still be limited financially?

Progress is fundamentally limited not by finances (which are a human abstraction) but by the energy budget and how much can be extracted from it. This has always been the case, really, although it's unusually blunt in case of AI since compute mostly needs cheap power. There's a separate question of who controls how much energy, and can therefore decide where it's spent. This isn't an inherent limitation to progress,…

But it’s not like someone is going to expend massive energy without any financial return

These problems are just for marketing for the time being

Maybe the worries of the field of math being “over” are a bit overblown since a lot of pure math these things may discover has no return to the company

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#934

Post by HDThoreaun » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

anthonypasq wrote: post #430

matherial wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really tired of these arguments (this and "it's just like calculators"). Photography decimated other forms of visual art, so the concern wasn't wrong. But AI threatens the entirety of human intellectual endeavors . I can make do without oil paintings in my home. I'm not sure I want to live in a future where we make do without brains.

you can still get oil paintings in your house. you just arent willing to pay for actual art

You can import oil paintings from China for very cheap. I’ve got a ton of nice ones

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#935

Post by drdeca » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 4:47 PM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #882

drdeca wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There ought to be more to life than sitting in a pod receiving sufficient nutrients from a tube, even if there was no doubt that humanity would in this way survive until the sun expands and makes the earth uninhabitable.

> There ought to be more to life than sitting in a pod receiving sufficient nutrients from a tube Even in a hypothetical world where AGI can do everything that humans do better, this would still be a choice to make, not an inevitable consequence for everyone. And life doesn't require suffering to have meaning.

Huh? Why bring up suffering? I was responding to the question of “Why is it a problem if people don’t understand things?” .

I was saying that human pursuit of understanding of things provides value beyond survival and resources.

Joint pursuit of a common goal is a way for people to better be-in-relation-with one-another.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#936

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #848

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 te…

You're basically saying that there's no purpose to it all if there's no human suffering involved, somehow. Why? Is suffering the purpose? What is the goal?

> You're basically saying that there's no purpose to it all if there's no human suffering involved, somehow.

Really? That's what you took from my post? Not enough eye rolls in me for that one.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#937

Post by mpascale00 » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

Strilanc wrote: post #234

This letter is complaining that human understanding has been crucial to advancing of mathematics, and AI companies are not bothering with it. But the promise (and horror) of AI mathematics is that, if it succeeds, human understanding becomes irrelevant. That's the goal . So this letter's message will fall on deaf ears. Keep in mind employees at AI companies are publicly stating that they believe they're risking a >10…

I agree insofar as this may fall on deaf ears of AI folks, but that the goals are differ is exactly the point of pointing out misalignment. To talk about this may be more useful for coalescing professional societies than for conversing directly with AI advancers.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#938

Post by larana » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 4:54 PM UTC

I don't feel nurtured and cared by mathematicians. I mean, it depends, it took me four years to find such professors. When I did, very recently, it felt like fresh air. A couple of good teachers among tenths of egotistical frustrated gatekeepers that humiliate students.

I do see a patient teacher on generative tools. What has keep me trying to learn math has not been mathematicians, but the support of people outside of the field.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#939

Post by erichocean » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

mdnahas wrote: post #877

As a consumer of mathematics, I want to attack the author’s idea of “what that work was meant to achieve in the first place”. I do a lot of programming that uses mathematics. I designed the error recovery file format “par2”. I worked as a quantitative trader. What do I want from math? To be able to search math results, understand them, and apply them. But academic mathematicians are so inwardly focused - as these aut…

I've had a similar experience.

LLMs doing math has made math far more accessible to me than it was pre-LLM.

Not just using existing math, but developing new math. (For example, I developed an alternative to NURBS surfaces for geometric kernels using LLMs.)

It's really annoying that anyone, anywhere is talking about halting math progress with AI.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#940

Post by erichocean » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

AdamN wrote: post #808

GMoromisato wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a difference between "photography will change art--we need to be ready" and "photography will change art, therefore stop photography." There is no doubt that AI has changed the practice of mathematics, just as it has changed the practice of software engineering (and will soon change almost every intellectual job). Trying to deal with change by saying, "please stop the change" is foolish, IMHO. Mathema…

> I think there's a difference between "photography will change art--we need to be ready" and "photography will change art, therefore stop photography." That wasn't the critique. The statements then were that photographs weren't actually art at all. They were the results of specialists with skills but not 'art'. Yet the photograph as a product was displacing real art in the marketplace.

AI is displacing real mathematicians.