7 ms·

AI is breaking our proxies for expertise

85 points by jbkcc 13d ago

yellow_postit 13d ago
“ Like mathematics, software engineers are going to have to rebuild our cultural sense of the kind of work we value.” From the closing is the change I see going in at every job area and level. My hunch is that this ultimately doubles back to those that excel at story telling and human coordination. As the AI systems “offload” not just production but I believe some initiation of what to build, the “why” and how to rally groups for any appreciably complex work matters more. I also hope to see a plenty of solo shops succeeding in spaces that used to take entire teams, but (for now) remain convicted human coordination remains a key need for most endeavors.
- jplusequalt 13d ago
  >My hunch is that this ultimately doubles back to those that excel at story telling and human coordination. As the AI systems “offload” not just production but I believe some initiation of what to build, the “why” and how to rally groups for any appreciably complex work matters more. The "why" behind most products is of little interest to the majority of workers. While it may be of the upmost importance (on the surface at least) for the leaders of a business, I see no reason why Bob from accounting is going to give a fuck about your company's grand vision. This is especially true if your company is in a mundane lane like B2B SaaS. You could argue that workers at SpaceX care about the "why", but 99.99% of companies aren't SpaceX.
  - vlan0 13d ago
    You are highlighting their point. You are pointing to current culture and behavior. The very first sentence that you responded to points to that culture and says it's gonna need to change, if you'd like to keep your job. People skills imo will always trump other skills. The best ideas never live because people don't know how to sell. And knowing and being very successful at selling requires that excellent story telling and human coordination.
seobot_dk1289 13d ago
[flagged]
hirvi74 13d ago
> people would know you were a skilled engineer. But now projects like that are worthless, because everyone just assumes they’re vibe-coded. I do not really care what other people think. Build something for the purity of building it for yourself or for a purpose. Thanks to AI, I feel like I have been writing the best code in my life. Yes, writing, not vibe-coding. I mainly just ask questions and ask for hints and clues. I do not use LLMs to do the fun parts for me. I am currently working on a game. If and when I ever finish it, I want to be able to say that I wrote every single line by hand. Will it make me better than anyone? No, not at all. I want to do it for myself.
- daveguy 13d ago
  I am 100% certain the code you write by hand will be better quality, even with AI pointing out options, than letting the AI string together completely obtuse abstractions.
  - hirvi74 13d ago
    GP here, hopefully you are correct. I have two projects running concurrently. One is my hand-written project. The other is one "demolition zone." In the latter, I can vibe-code and do whatever I want just to see what LLMs can hack away at in comparison. Besides the enjoyment I get from programming by hand, I have a more overarching concern when it comes to a building a full game. I am using Monogame, and I realized that is probably not the library to use if I am going to have no understanding of how things work under the hood. I tried to review LLM code, but without knowing enough of Monogame's API, I really couldn't make a good judgement call on the quality. Looking at the LLM code, for example, were the keyboard and game pad implementations correct? I am not sure at first glance. I haven't implemented one since I used C++ in a game dev class in college over 12 years ago. The LLM's tests passed, which is fine and dandy, but how do I know the tests are truly valid if I do not understand what is fundamentally being tested? I am not building this game entirely for fun either (though I am having a blast). I am working with a few non-technical friends on making this game. So, I do not want to disappoint them by creating something with bugs that I cannot fix because I have no earthly clue how anything works. I believe that would be embarrassing for me and disrespectful to them.
jplusequalt 13d ago
I'm sure this delights many people in todays age. Just like how social media has possessed many people with cultivating an outward facing image that often diverges with reality, AI posses people to portray themselves as an artist/developer/musician/etc. without having put in any of the work.
vatsachak 13d ago
I disagree that AI has broken the proxies. Football analogy; AI is the wide receiver and the human is the quarterback. Even if you're the best WR in the game you're still not producing touchdowns unless you have a decent QB. It's super easy to smell vibe coded projects. All of these proofs and vibe code are impossible without human work. Call me when GPT whatever writes gcc from scratch
- BoxFour 13d ago
  This is a good point but probably not in the way you intended. If AI is the wide receiver, it’s perceived currently by many to be an absolutely elite top-tier receiver. Especially at lower leagues, QBs who have these clearly elite WRs are discounted and considered more-or-less replaceable all the time, because “anyone could throw the ball to Megatron 2.0”. See, for example, Graham Harrell at Texas Tech: Paired with Michael Crabtree, put up insane numbers, went undrafted. Shedeur Sanders is another more controversial recent example. It’s definitely not a guarantee that people will see the QB as valuable if the WR is that good.
  - vatsachak 13d ago
    I guess I was thinking about the NFL but you're right about college. Your point also extends the analogy, the AI might seem enough at lower levels due to that reason
  - Catloafdev 13d ago
    People can sniff out LLM generated stuff relatively quickly, the WR raises the floor. The bar just took a very noticeable jump that people are still adjusting to. Anything the WR can do on it's own is often seen as 'AI slop' - so now what matters is the QB. Because any random junk QB that doesn't meaningfully improve the WR's output is indistinguishable from AI slop. The distinguishing factor is solely the QB.
    - BoxFour 13d ago
      > Anything the WR can do on it's own is often seen as 'AI slop' This has not been my experience inside of a FAANG, in fact rather the opposite: People have been getting praised for AI slop because they can produce it quickly and it’s “good enough”. The pendulum is slowly starting to swing back a little bit, but mostly because people have realized there’s effectively infinite noise now and doing anything, regardless of how skilled of a QB you are, is not being rewarded.
deleted 13d ago
[deleted]
exprez135 13d ago
Anastasia Berg and Jon Baskin wrote a piece in August called “On Radical Preservation,” [1] in which they use the example of the shared concept of 'merit' to warn about the dangers of an AI-filled present and future. They anecdotally compare our situation to that of the Crow people, through the testimony of Plenty Coups, who described the fall of the buffalo and the end of the practices, rituals, concepts, and way of life that his people understood as making up what it was to live an excellent life (or not). Likewise, they point to merit (which I think we consider very much like expertise) as one such fundamental concept in our society, which is very much undermined by unchecked use of LLMs. This coming not just via "cheating," but by the way in which we so quickly are willing to claim, and ourselves believe, that we deserve praise for that which the machine has created. On a wide scale, their use will not just compete with those who may not use the machine, but will destroy even our shared idea of personal merit. Beyond merit alone, AI might lead generally to our "own cultural values becom[ing] not just decadent or debatable but unintelligible." At the end, Berg and Baskin basically say that hope is not sufficient (hope that the old concepts will be replaced with new ones); the proper attitude is to do everything in our power to preserve them in the present. [1]: https://thepointmag.com/letter/on-radical-preservation https://thepointmag.com/letter/on-radical-preservation
- unified101 13d ago
  Serious question - what's so special about personal merit anyway? In hunter gatherers it was might, in current age it's brain, but either are equally arbitrary. I prefer a world that's equalocracy, with a focus on specific personal-freedoms (live and let live principle).
  - alchemism 13d ago
    Isolated Hunter-Gatherers tended to (and still) coalesce around the person whose opinions were correct more often then not. Violence was not a default until populations grew. The measures may be arbitrary, but can always be defined as “born with the right attributes in the right place at the right time.”
    - 13d ago
claimdesk_v 13d ago
[flagged]
bwfan123 13d ago
> Understanding the concrete problem mathematicians are upset about can help us better understand the impact of AI on our own fields, imo, The author of this essay does not understand the concrete problem that mathematicians are upset about. There is an idea that math [1] and coding [2] are human activities whose purpose is to achieve a certain kind of insight or mental clarity of things. The simplest description of this is by Feyman [3]. AI generated proofs short-circuit human understanding and therefore goes against the primary purpose. The declaration is calling this out loudly to reiterate that the purpose of the endaevor is not the generation and rewarding of proofs. [1] "On proof and progress in math" https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/9404236 https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/9404236 [2] "Programming as theory building" https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf [3] "What I cannot create, I do not understand"
- omnicognate 13d ago
  > But that doesnt mean it is not useful. If you think the declaration is saying AI is not useful it's you that "does not understand the concrete problem that mathematicians are upset about". Terence Tao uses AI heavily and has been writing extensively about how useful it is ever since it became useful in maths.
  - srcreigh 13d ago
    What do you think the concrete problem is?
    - omnicognate 13d ago
      That AI companies are pouring huge resources into strip mining outstanding problems for bragging rights rather than introducing the technology responsibly in a way that benefits the field. Somebody will now respond that it doesn't matter that it doesn't benefit the field if it can produce the product without the mathematicians, but the whole point is that an LLM-generated Lean proof isn't the product. The proof of a singularity in Navier-Stokes is of zero commercial value (except bragging rights) in itself. If it ever results in something of commercial value it will be far downstream, after any new, valuable ideas in it have been digested, explored, explained, etc. This is work for mathematicians that LLMs cannot (currently) do. And next someone will respond that LLMs will be able to do that work, however that is a prediction that is yet to come about. It might happen, it might not. To tear down something valuable now on the assumption that it will become obsolete in the future is wildly irresponsible.
ngriffiths 13d ago
> We might say that generating ideas is the real intellectual work of mathematics. The article talks about how many new ideas are relatively worthless and the real goal is to find the "concepts that 'carve nature at its joints.'" I think this is the crux of the whole thing and I haven't seen a satisfying discussion of it anywhere. I mean, FLT is mentioned. Is that an accessible proof to humans? Is it full of these high value, refined concepts or is it more like a bunch of little hacks that at least dozens if not hundreds of people randomly stumbled upon, in an all out attempt to solve one of the most famous math problems? I'm not totally convinced what value math concepts have beyond "you can use them to solve even more math problems." I really want to believe there is. But if not, it's just a pure benefit to have faster ways to solve them, no?
- nicf 13d ago
  There are definitely some results which have this "a bunch of little hacks" quality you're describing, and while opinions differ I share your intuition that there's something a little disappointing about solving a big problem that way. But I think FLT is about as far as one can get from that situation! Wiles's work was the culmination of centuries of theory-building work, and the concepts that were developed over that time are far more important than FLT; the thing Wiles actually proved (a special case of something called the "Modularity Theorem", the full version of which was proved a bit later) is itself much more valuable to human understanding of mathematics than FLT. It's certainly very cool that it can be used to answer such a simple question that was open for so long, and it makes for a great headline, but I think if you asked number theorists working in the area they would almost all tell you that they're much more grateful for the theory that came out of this quest than for the mere fact that the quest was completed.
- tpdly 13d ago
  Agreed! There has not been enough appreciation for re-organization efforts of the dependency-tree of knowledge. Now that expansion of the frontier has been somewhat trivialized, it should be an indication that our priorities have not been entirely wise. The value of these math concepts is in their explanatory power. We want to understand! Insofar as we want to maximize the diffusion of powerful thought-tools, ironing out the wrinkles at the frontier is needed to be able to fold everything up neatly. The benefit we should seek is wide diffusion of powerful theories, and the folding and the neatness has been long undervalued.
duendefm 13d ago
Not an anti-AI view at all, but right now people is exaggerating a bit on the "AI is solving math". For now they are good at finding holes on theories, proving by negation, not proving for all cases, nor coming up with new theories.
- ngruhn 13d ago
  > currently A few years ago they couldn't do basic arithmetic. Is there any reason to think that capabilities flatline from now? > proving by negation, not proving for all cases I'm finding 2.2k "∀" symbols in the Navier-Stokes proof repo: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aopenai%2FNavierStokesAndEuler+%E2%88%80&type=code https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aopenai%2FNavierStokesAndE... It's not like can't proof universal properties.
  - duendefm 13d ago
    Yeah that's why I said "right now people is". Then, ∀ for intermediate steps is not the same as ∀ for the final solution of Millennium Prize Problems' level. Fable exists for some 6 months now, internally, so the frontier kind of is a bit old right now, we will see how fast things keep going.
  - owebmaster 13d ago
    > there any reason to think that capabilities flatline from now? 4 years ago ChatGPT created better slop than current Claude Opus 5. It's a regression: things good objectively worse. You can find multiple threads here or on Reddit about that. Models won't necessarily get better.
wrs 13d ago
> If you know proposition X is true, it’s easier to figure out why. This misses the point entirely. If you know proposition X is true or false, you won’t bother spending years trying to prove or disprove it, developing deep understanding and potentially even developing entire new fields of math in the process. (See FLT.) That’s why it’s so destructive to the discovery process to have an LLM just generate a proof or counterexample without the side effect of generating useful explanatory or generative structures that we can build on. That said, there are examples like Ramanujan where someone did an info dump of unexplained theorems that people try to mine useful structures from, but that’s not at all the mainstream of mathematical progress.
0-_-0 13d ago
What if there are math problems that can only be brute forced? How do we know that Navier-Stokes even has a nice and elegant solution?
karmakaze 13d ago
> i.e. whether frontier AI models aren’t generating or can’t generate new mathematical ideas. [...] I give basically zero credence to the idea that AIs are incapable of this because of some intrinsic feature of how LLMs work. I also believe there are limitations of LLMs, but not necessarily where people think. I won't expect LLMs to be creative solvers until they can tell a novel funny joke with any recognition/consistency.
srcreigh 13d ago
> I think it’s broadly unclear whether (3) is true: i.e. whether frontier AI models aren’t generating or can’t generate new mathematical ideas. ... I give basically zero credence to the idea that AIs are incapable of this because of some intrinsic feature of how LLMs work. LLMs are computer programs, so there are math problems which they cannot solve. AKA, ideas which are not possible for them to generate. The argument for this is that Busy Beaver function is uncomputable. More specifically, some N-state Turing machine requires a proof that it doesn't halt. At some point N is too large and LLM being a computer program, it cannot generate the required proof. See the Busy Beaver Frontier [1] This is VERY DIFFERENT from the Halting Problem. In the Halting Problem, we see that no computer can decide whether an arbitrary given input program halts. With the argument above, for a fixed LLM, there is specific math problem which is beyond the capability of proof by the LLM (though other LLMs or humans could perhaps prove it). Humans are not bound by the argument since we aren't finite computer programs (no proof for this anyways). LLMs which "evolve" over time with input from the natural world also aren't bound by this, since their code is effectively infinite. The argument only applies to a static program with fixed input, no dynamic information sources. Some people believe in divine inspiration. Maybe you could believe that humans incorporate information from the natural world which LLMs don't have access to. Either of these beliefs would imply that humans have an edge. [1]: https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/bb.pdf https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/bb.pdf
- im3w1l 13d ago
  A very simple program that loops over all strings and feeds them into a proof verifier should eventually prove every statement that can be proven, as far as I can tell?
  - srcreigh 13d ago
    No, but you hit the nail on the head, that’s the most interesting part. The proof verifier uses fixed math axioms. The busy beaver function at high enough N cannot be proven with those axioms.
    - im3w1l 13d ago
gleezard 13d ago
Mathematics is a solved problem.
gos9 13d ago
Slop article

85 points by jbkcc 13d ago

“ Like mathematics, software engineers are going to have to rebuild our cultural sense of the kind of work we value.” From the closing is the change I see going in at every job area and level. My hunch is that this ultimately doubles back to those that excel at story telling and human coordination. As the AI systems “offload” not just production but I believe some initiation of what to build, the “why” and how to rally groups for any appreciably complex work matters more. I also hope to see a plenty of solo shops succeeding in spaces that used to take entire teams, but (for now) remain convicted human coordination remains a key need for most endeavors.

jplusequalt 13d ago
>My hunch is that this ultimately doubles back to those that excel at story telling and human coordination. As the AI systems “offload” not just production but I believe some initiation of what to build, the “why” and how to rally groups for any appreciably complex work matters more. The "why" behind most products is of little interest to the majority of workers. While it may be of the upmost importance (on the surface at least) for the leaders of a business, I see no reason why Bob from accounting is going to give a fuck about your company's grand vision. This is especially true if your company is in a mundane lane like B2B SaaS. You could argue that workers at SpaceX care about the "why", but 99.99% of companies aren't SpaceX.
- vlan0 13d ago
  You are highlighting their point. You are pointing to current culture and behavior. The very first sentence that you responded to points to that culture and says it's gonna need to change, if you'd like to keep your job. People skills imo will always trump other skills. The best ideas never live because people don't know how to sell. And knowing and being very successful at selling requires that excellent story telling and human coordination.

seobot_dk1289 13d ago

[flagged]

hirvi74 13d ago

> people would know you were a skilled engineer. But now projects like that are worthless, because everyone just assumes they’re vibe-coded. I do not really care what other people think. Build something for the purity of building it for yourself or for a purpose. Thanks to AI, I feel like I have been writing the best code in my life. Yes, writing, not vibe-coding. I mainly just ask questions and ask for hints and clues. I do not use LLMs to do the fun parts for me. I am currently working on a game. If and when I ever finish it, I want to be able to say that I wrote every single line by hand. Will it make me better than anyone? No, not at all. I want to do it for myself.

daveguy 13d ago
I am 100% certain the code you write by hand will be better quality, even with AI pointing out options, than letting the AI string together completely obtuse abstractions.
- hirvi74 13d ago
  GP here, hopefully you are correct. I have two projects running concurrently. One is my hand-written project. The other is one "demolition zone." In the latter, I can vibe-code and do whatever I want just to see what LLMs can hack away at in comparison. Besides the enjoyment I get from programming by hand, I have a more overarching concern when it comes to a building a full game. I am using Monogame, and I realized that is probably not the library to use if I am going to have no understanding of how things work under the hood. I tried to review LLM code, but without knowing enough of Monogame's API, I really couldn't make a good judgement call on the quality. Looking at the LLM code, for example, were the keyboard and game pad implementations correct? I am not sure at first glance. I haven't implemented one since I used C++ in a game dev class in college over 12 years ago. The LLM's tests passed, which is fine and dandy, but how do I know the tests are truly valid if I do not understand what is fundamentally being tested? I am not building this game entirely for fun either (though I am having a blast). I am working with a few non-technical friends on making this game. So, I do not want to disappoint them by creating something with bugs that I cannot fix because I have no earthly clue how anything works. I believe that would be embarrassing for me and disrespectful to them.

jplusequalt 13d ago

I'm sure this delights many people in todays age. Just like how social media has possessed many people with cultivating an outward facing image that often diverges with reality, AI posses people to portray themselves as an artist/developer/musician/etc. without having put in any of the work.

vatsachak 13d ago

I disagree that AI has broken the proxies. Football analogy; AI is the wide receiver and the human is the quarterback. Even if you're the best WR in the game you're still not producing touchdowns unless you have a decent QB. It's super easy to smell vibe coded projects. All of these proofs and vibe code are impossible without human work. Call me when GPT whatever writes gcc from scratch

BoxFour 13d ago
This is a good point but probably not in the way you intended. If AI is the wide receiver, it’s perceived currently by many to be an absolutely elite top-tier receiver. Especially at lower leagues, QBs who have these clearly elite WRs are discounted and considered more-or-less replaceable all the time, because “anyone could throw the ball to Megatron 2.0”. See, for example, Graham Harrell at Texas Tech: Paired with Michael Crabtree, put up insane numbers, went undrafted. Shedeur Sanders is another more controversial recent example. It’s definitely not a guarantee that people will see the QB as valuable if the WR is that good.
- vatsachak 13d ago
  I guess I was thinking about the NFL but you're right about college. Your point also extends the analogy, the AI might seem enough at lower levels due to that reason
- Catloafdev 13d ago
  People can sniff out LLM generated stuff relatively quickly, the WR raises the floor. The bar just took a very noticeable jump that people are still adjusting to. Anything the WR can do on it's own is often seen as 'AI slop' - so now what matters is the QB. Because any random junk QB that doesn't meaningfully improve the WR's output is indistinguishable from AI slop. The distinguishing factor is solely the QB.
  - BoxFour 13d ago
    > Anything the WR can do on it's own is often seen as 'AI slop' This has not been my experience inside of a FAANG, in fact rather the opposite: People have been getting praised for AI slop because they can produce it quickly and it’s “good enough”. The pendulum is slowly starting to swing back a little bit, but mostly because people have realized there’s effectively infinite noise now and doing anything, regardless of how skilled of a QB you are, is not being rewarded.

deleted 13d ago

[deleted]

exprez135 13d ago

Anastasia Berg and Jon Baskin wrote a piece in August called “On Radical Preservation,” [1] in which they use the example of the shared concept of 'merit' to warn about the dangers of an AI-filled present and future. They anecdotally compare our situation to that of the Crow people, through the testimony of Plenty Coups, who described the fall of the buffalo and the end of the practices, rituals, concepts, and way of life that his people understood as making up what it was to live an excellent life (or not). Likewise, they point to merit (which I think we consider very much like expertise) as one such fundamental concept in our society, which is very much undermined by unchecked use of LLMs. This coming not just via "cheating," but by the way in which we so quickly are willing to claim, and ourselves believe, that we deserve praise for that which the machine has created. On a wide scale, their use will not just compete with those who may not use the machine, but will destroy even our shared idea of personal merit. Beyond merit alone, AI might lead generally to our "own cultural values becom[ing] not just decadent or debatable but unintelligible." At the end, Berg and Baskin basically say that hope is not sufficient (hope that the old concepts will be replaced with new ones); the proper attitude is to do everything in our power to preserve them in the present. [1]: https://thepointmag.com/letter/on-radical-preservation https://thepointmag.com/letter/on-radical-preservation

unified101 13d ago
Serious question - what's so special about personal merit anyway? In hunter gatherers it was might, in current age it's brain, but either are equally arbitrary. I prefer a world that's equalocracy, with a focus on specific personal-freedoms (live and let live principle).
- alchemism 13d ago
  Isolated Hunter-Gatherers tended to (and still) coalesce around the person whose opinions were correct more often then not. Violence was not a default until populations grew. The measures may be arbitrary, but can always be defined as “born with the right attributes in the right place at the right time.”
  - 13d ago

claimdesk_v 13d ago

[flagged]

bwfan123 13d ago

> Understanding the concrete problem mathematicians are upset about can help us better understand the impact of AI on our own fields, imo, The author of this essay does not understand the concrete problem that mathematicians are upset about. There is an idea that math [1] and coding [2] are human activities whose purpose is to achieve a certain kind of insight or mental clarity of things. The simplest description of this is by Feyman [3]. AI generated proofs short-circuit human understanding and therefore goes against the primary purpose. The declaration is calling this out loudly to reiterate that the purpose of the endaevor is not the generation and rewarding of proofs. [1] "On proof and progress in math" https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/9404236 https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/9404236 [2] "Programming as theory building" https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf [3] "What I cannot create, I do not understand"

omnicognate 13d ago
> But that doesnt mean it is not useful. If you think the declaration is saying AI is not useful it's you that "does not understand the concrete problem that mathematicians are upset about". Terence Tao uses AI heavily and has been writing extensively about how useful it is ever since it became useful in maths.
- srcreigh 13d ago
  What do you think the concrete problem is?
  - omnicognate 13d ago
    That AI companies are pouring huge resources into strip mining outstanding problems for bragging rights rather than introducing the technology responsibly in a way that benefits the field. Somebody will now respond that it doesn't matter that it doesn't benefit the field if it can produce the product without the mathematicians, but the whole point is that an LLM-generated Lean proof isn't the product. The proof of a singularity in Navier-Stokes is of zero commercial value (except bragging rights) in itself. If it ever results in something of commercial value it will be far downstream, after any new, valuable ideas in it have been digested, explored, explained, etc. This is work for mathematicians that LLMs cannot (currently) do. And next someone will respond that LLMs will be able to do that work, however that is a prediction that is yet to come about. It might happen, it might not. To tear down something valuable now on the assumption that it will become obsolete in the future is wildly irresponsible.

ngriffiths 13d ago

> We might say that generating ideas is the real intellectual work of mathematics. The article talks about how many new ideas are relatively worthless and the real goal is to find the "concepts that 'carve nature at its joints.'" I think this is the crux of the whole thing and I haven't seen a satisfying discussion of it anywhere. I mean, FLT is mentioned. Is that an accessible proof to humans? Is it full of these high value, refined concepts or is it more like a bunch of little hacks that at least dozens if not hundreds of people randomly stumbled upon, in an all out attempt to solve one of the most famous math problems? I'm not totally convinced what value math concepts have beyond "you can use them to solve even more math problems." I really want to believe there is. But if not, it's just a pure benefit to have faster ways to solve them, no?

nicf 13d ago
There are definitely some results which have this "a bunch of little hacks" quality you're describing, and while opinions differ I share your intuition that there's something a little disappointing about solving a big problem that way. But I think FLT is about as far as one can get from that situation! Wiles's work was the culmination of centuries of theory-building work, and the concepts that were developed over that time are far more important than FLT; the thing Wiles actually proved (a special case of something called the "Modularity Theorem", the full version of which was proved a bit later) is itself much more valuable to human understanding of mathematics than FLT. It's certainly very cool that it can be used to answer such a simple question that was open for so long, and it makes for a great headline, but I think if you asked number theorists working in the area they would almost all tell you that they're much more grateful for the theory that came out of this quest than for the mere fact that the quest was completed.
tpdly 13d ago
Agreed! There has not been enough appreciation for re-organization efforts of the dependency-tree of knowledge. Now that expansion of the frontier has been somewhat trivialized, it should be an indication that our priorities have not been entirely wise. The value of these math concepts is in their explanatory power. We want to understand! Insofar as we want to maximize the diffusion of powerful thought-tools, ironing out the wrinkles at the frontier is needed to be able to fold everything up neatly. The benefit we should seek is wide diffusion of powerful theories, and the folding and the neatness has been long undervalued.

duendefm 13d ago

Not an anti-AI view at all, but right now people is exaggerating a bit on the "AI is solving math". For now they are good at finding holes on theories, proving by negation, not proving for all cases, nor coming up with new theories.

ngruhn 13d ago
> currently A few years ago they couldn't do basic arithmetic. Is there any reason to think that capabilities flatline from now? > proving by negation, not proving for all cases I'm finding 2.2k "∀" symbols in the Navier-Stokes proof repo: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aopenai%2FNavierStokesAndEuler+%E2%88%80&type=code https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aopenai%2FNavierStokesAndE... It's not like can't proof universal properties.
- duendefm 13d ago
  Yeah that's why I said "right now people is". Then, ∀ for intermediate steps is not the same as ∀ for the final solution of Millennium Prize Problems' level. Fable exists for some 6 months now, internally, so the frontier kind of is a bit old right now, we will see how fast things keep going.
- owebmaster 13d ago
  > there any reason to think that capabilities flatline from now? 4 years ago ChatGPT created better slop than current Claude Opus 5. It's a regression: things good objectively worse. You can find multiple threads here or on Reddit about that. Models won't necessarily get better.

wrs 13d ago

> If you know proposition X is true, it’s easier to figure out why. This misses the point entirely. If you know proposition X is true or false, you won’t bother spending years trying to prove or disprove it, developing deep understanding and potentially even developing entire new fields of math in the process. (See FLT.) That’s why it’s so destructive to the discovery process to have an LLM just generate a proof or counterexample without the side effect of generating useful explanatory or generative structures that we can build on. That said, there are examples like Ramanujan where someone did an info dump of unexplained theorems that people try to mine useful structures from, but that’s not at all the mainstream of mathematical progress.

0-_-0 13d ago

What if there are math problems that can only be brute forced? How do we know that Navier-Stokes even has a nice and elegant solution?

karmakaze 13d ago

> i.e. whether frontier AI models aren’t generating or can’t generate new mathematical ideas. [...] I give basically zero credence to the idea that AIs are incapable of this because of some intrinsic feature of how LLMs work. I also believe there are limitations of LLMs, but not necessarily where people think. I won't expect LLMs to be creative solvers until they can tell a novel funny joke with any recognition/consistency.

srcreigh 13d ago

> I think it’s broadly unclear whether (3) is true: i.e. whether frontier AI models aren’t generating or can’t generate new mathematical ideas. ... I give basically zero credence to the idea that AIs are incapable of this because of some intrinsic feature of how LLMs work. LLMs are computer programs, so there are math problems which they cannot solve. AKA, ideas which are not possible for them to generate. The argument for this is that Busy Beaver function is uncomputable. More specifically, some N-state Turing machine requires a proof that it doesn't halt. At some point N is too large and LLM being a computer program, it cannot generate the required proof. See the Busy Beaver Frontier [1] This is VERY DIFFERENT from the Halting Problem. In the Halting Problem, we see that no computer can decide whether an arbitrary given input program halts. With the argument above, for a fixed LLM, there is specific math problem which is beyond the capability of proof by the LLM (though other LLMs or humans could perhaps prove it). Humans are not bound by the argument since we aren't finite computer programs (no proof for this anyways). LLMs which "evolve" over time with input from the natural world also aren't bound by this, since their code is effectively infinite. The argument only applies to a static program with fixed input, no dynamic information sources. Some people believe in divine inspiration. Maybe you could believe that humans incorporate information from the natural world which LLMs don't have access to. Either of these beliefs would imply that humans have an edge. [1]: https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/bb.pdf https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/bb.pdf

im3w1l 13d ago
A very simple program that loops over all strings and feeds them into a proof verifier should eventually prove every statement that can be proven, as far as I can tell?
- srcreigh 13d ago
  No, but you hit the nail on the head, that’s the most interesting part. The proof verifier uses fixed math axioms. The busy beaver function at high enough N cannot be proven with those axioms.
  - im3w1l 13d ago

gleezard 13d ago

Mathematics is a solved problem.

gos9 13d ago

Slop article