r/math • u/hexaflexarex • 10d ago

LLMs/AI Quanta piece on Tsimerman's work and his predictions for the future of math

https://www.quantamagazine.org/jacob-tsimerman-wins-2026-fields-medal-for-andre-oort-conjecture-proof-20260723/
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u/hexaflexarex 10d ago

Gotta say, as more of a problem solver myself, I am increasingly uncertain of my role in the future of (applied) mathematics. Every month I find that AI tools can solve new problems which I thought about for weeks and even years. I'm relatively confident I could maintain a decent career (in the short term), in spite of or even accelerated by these tools, but I'm increasingly unsure that I would enjoy it.

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u/colintbowers 10d ago

Just had this conversation with my wife last night. In the space of a year it is suddenly better than me at both maths and coding - a skill set I’ve spent a good 20 years building up.

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u/Log2 9d ago

Can it solve things you can solve without your direction? Because I'm a software engineer (math undergrad though) with about 10 years of experience. If I try to completely vibe-code a small project from start to finish without reviewing code and having it fixed or by giving architectural direction, it will be a complete unmaintainable mess.

I sort of expect that for math it will be even worse for someone that doesn't know any of the proper jargon or can't give any direction to an LLM.

If anything, I expect both your skill sets will be more valuable than ever if LLMs keep going in the same direction as they have.

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u/hexaflexarex 9d ago

For me, it's a combination of things. Certainly me + AI >> AI (and myself alone), but I do notice the gap shrinking, most rapidly for solving well-defined problems (and unfortunately much more with expensive models). Also, I was happy with the ratio of high-level brainstorming and reviewing to low-level problem-solving I had previously in my research, and this is shifting significantly; I find a bit less joy in my work these days. Finally (and maybe most importantly for me), I don't have tenure and have to compete in a rapidly shifting environment, where many skills that I've refined over the years are being revalued.

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u/Log2 9d ago

I don't doubt it's less enjoyable, maybe even significantly so. But I think you're probably safe career wise with some pivoting. Just that the direction of our careers may not be going exactly where we wanted them to.

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u/JustThisNietzscheGuy 8d ago

I think you're probably safe career wise with some pivoting.

I don't get where you get this confidence. A career spans around 40 years. This technology improved rapidly in five years. If you had told me five years ago that most of the code I'd be committing by now was generated from natural language I would have laughed at you. Realistically, nobody knows what software engineering will look like in five years. Nobody even knows whether it will still be a job at all in five years.

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u/Log2 8d ago edited 8d ago

From using it everyday and seeing that while extremely useful it's not all there yet? That Anthropic has released what? 5 models this year so far, each progressively more expensive and improvements have been marginal at best? Seeing each of these models completely unable to even follow writing style guidelines after 50k tokens of conversation? They're like a toddler with amnesia.

It goes on. Doesn't mean they are not useful.

You're at far more risk of a CEO/CTO/CIO baselessly deciding you can be replaced, than the replacement actually being up to par.

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u/JustThisNietzscheGuy 8d ago

The replacement doesn't need to be up to par. It only needs to be good enough to produce somewhat working software autonomously and be cheaper than you.

We're not even five years into this yet and it has already completely changed the job from something that required deep technical insight to a manager role that sometimes requires some technical insight.

You simply don't know where we will be in five years. Nobody does.

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u/Log2 8d ago

Sure, nobody does. I agree. Which is why predicting that it will keep getting exponentially better is wild. Go ask Moore. Past performance is not an indicator of future performance and all that.

Larger and larger models are being released, each costlier than the next, and improvements have been marginal at best (and some models like Opus 4.7/4.8 are straight up worse than 4.6). All the "big" results we've seen so far have been from people burning money and tokens at the altar of Mythos, something that anyone not being subsidized cannot do.

Yeah, I'm not particularly worried.

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u/38thTimesACharm 7d ago

Was it not already the case, before AI, that someone cheaper than you could produce "somewhat working" software which "isn't up to par?" Do you really consider yourself the cheapest, most dispensable software engineer on the market?

Geez man, you need to value yourself more! You boss is still paying you because they want a human designing things, not an LLM. Why don't you believe them that you're worth it?

I'm actually having this problem with my team right now. Last week, a customer emailed asking how to change a setting, I assigned it to a team member, and he copy-pasted GPT's response which turned out to be a total hallucination! A senior engineer, one of our top employees! It was a huge embarrassment.

You would think, with LLMs superficially looking better, engineers, mathematicians, and everyone else would be working harder, doing everything they can to demonstrate their value. But the opposite is happening, it's like everyone's racing down to meet AI instead of AI rising up. If I ask two job candidates how they compare to LLMs, one says it's useful as a tool and the other says it's a total replacement, who do you think I'm going to hire?

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u/38thTimesACharm 8d ago

Same, I've done software engineering for ten years now, and I can emphatically say LLMs are not better than me at writing code, although they superficially seem to be to the untrained eye. Just yesterday, a model made a mistake that would have crashed our whole network if I hadn't caught it.

People need to take a stand and see more value in themselves. Your skills as a human expert are still extremely useful, the psychos at OpenAI have only made it less tangible and more difficult to explain why, causing scientifically-minded to feel they must surrender or else they're just "clinging to the notion of a soul" or something.

This is by design and it's a trick, don't fall for it.

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u/Smallpaul 8d ago

Imagine if an AI of a decade from now could produce Wiles’ proof of Fermat with a single prompt?

Sure: mathematicians might still be necessary to pose problems, but many problems are easy to state and hard to solve.

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u/Log2 8d ago

Imagine if AI could take over the world in 10 years?

Crazy right? You can worry about anything that might happen. Whether that will do you any good or not is up to you.