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LLMs Are Currently Not Helpful at All for Math Research: Hamkins

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Re: LLMs Are Currently Not Helpful at All for Math Research: Hamkins

#11

Post by fragmede »

panny wrote: post #9
fragmede wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's currently #15 on the front page. https://hnrankings.info/46496026/

I believe you, but also believe me when I tell you it is not on my frontpage. ctrl-F llm https://i.imgur.com/D5K6b9c.png Not this story. edit: Hi fragmede, I'd reply but Nazi @dang says I'm posting too fast again. I guess you won't be working on that fully free chromebook hardware either. I'll keep trying anyway. I'm not motivated by money like you guys. Keep chasing that carrot however.

HN rankings put it on the front page for 15 minutes, now it's dropped to 44th. Point is, not everything is a vast conspiracy against you, as much as it would make it easier for you to believe the world is run by some shadowy conspiracy, that there's someone in charge of things.

Re: LLMs Are Currently Not Helpful at All for Math Research: Hamkins

#12

Post by onetokeoverthe »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #6

> “I’ve played around with it and I’ve tried experimenting, but I haven’t found it helpful at all. Basically zero. It’s not helpful to me. And I’ve used various systems and so on, the paid models and so on.” Eh... I don't know. It's hard for me to believe such absolutist takes. Especially since other proeminent mathematicians (i.e. Tao) have spoken highly of the help and value they get from these systems. I also see…

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Re: LLMs Are Currently Not Helpful at All for Math Research: Hamkins

#14

Post by demirbey05 »

It's hard to cut through the AI hype when there are billions of dollars at stake. I usually trust negative comments more, as long as the person isn't trying to sell a course. Even though Terence Tao is a respected scientist, I wonder if his recent comments are driven by a need for funding due to federal cuts. I’ve had similar experiences with LLMs—whenever I ask them about hard math or RL theory, they almost always give me the wrong answers.

Re: LLMs Are Currently Not Helpful at All for Math Research: Hamkins

#15

Post by ben_w »

demirbey05 wrote: post #14

It's hard to cut through the AI hype when there are billions of dollars at stake. I usually trust negative comments more, as long as the person isn't trying to sell a course. Even though Terence Tao is a respected scientist, I wonder if his recent comments are driven by a need for funding due to federal cuts. I’ve had similar experiences with LLMs—whenever I ask them about hard math or RL theory, they almost always g…

I also care more about the failure modes than the successes, although in my case, it's because I keep finding them exceptionally useful at software development, and I:

1. Don't want to use them where they suck.

Think normalisation of deviance: "the problems haven't affected me therefore they don't exist" is a way to get really badly burned.

2. Want to train up in things they will still suck at by the time I've leared whatever it is.

I find LLMs seem kinda bad at writing sheet music, and Suno is kinda bad at werid instructions (like Stable Diffusion for images), but I expect them to get good before I can.

I also find them inconsistent at non-Euclidian problems: sometimes they can, sometimes they can't. I have absolutely no idea how to monetise that, but even if I could, "inconsistent" is itself an improvement on "cannot ever" which is what SOTA was a few years ago.

Re: LLMs Are Currently Not Helpful at All for Math Research: Hamkins

#16

Post by erelong »

As the kids would say, sounds like a "skill issue", but more kindly just that this user hasn't developed a use for the tools for his specific use cases, which is fine; however an implication that the tools aren't useful for other people seems to contradict others' experience reports on how they have been able to find uses for the tools

Re: LLMs Are Currently Not Helpful at All for Math Research: Hamkins

#17

Post by imtringued »

For me personally LLMs have made it way easier to discover obscure or unfamiliar math concepts. It's way harder to get into a topic if you have to read through hundreds of pages and then wonder if it was time well spent, compared to just finding the bits that are interesting to you and then getting deeper into the topic as you need.

Re: LLMs Are Currently Not Helpful at All for Math Research: Hamkins

#18

Post by mcv »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #6

> “I’ve played around with it and I’ve tried experimenting, but I haven’t found it helpful at all. Basically zero. It’s not helpful to me. And I’ve used various systems and so on, the paid models and so on.” Eh... I don't know. It's hard for me to believe such absolutist takes. Especially since other proeminent mathematicians (i.e. Tao) have spoken highly of the help and value they get from these systems. I also see…

I've been using it very recently. Not for mathematics , but for programming. And while Claude Opus is much more likely to admit mistake ("You're absolutely correct!" instead of "That's fine") when I correct it, it does require correcting, and has been incapable at grasping complex problems. I can't trust it to produce correct code for complex problems, because when I did, the solution turned out to be wrong. Plausible looking, and certainly producing some results, but not the correct ones.

It has still been useful, because parts of the problem have been solved before, and in some cases it can accurately reproduce those parts, which has been massively helpful. And it can help me understand some aspects of the problem. But it can't solve it for me. It has shown that that's simply beyond its capabilities.

Re: LLMs Are Currently Not Helpful at All for Math Research: Hamkins

#19

Post by pfdietz »

MaysonL wrote: post #8

Terry Tao has found them helpful in the past[0], and I’d trust him over Hamkins. [0] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/12/08/the-story-of-erdos...

Tao has also used "Good Old Fashioned AI" (in the form of Mace4/Prover9) for math research.

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/12/09/the-equational-the...

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