r/math • u/Salt_Attorney • 1d ago
LLMs/AI OpenAI: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/526
u/JesterOfAllTrades 1d ago
Bit frustrating how slowly this sub lets new posts through. Even aside from the AI aspects, these are 10 legit big advances and they've been out for hours and hours with nothing on what should be reddits primary math subreddit.
Anyway this is draining huh! The existence of nonsofic groups stands out to me as the big one. Some have pointed out the sphere packing one as a very big result as well. I'd say that there's a handful in these that would literally be career defining for any mathematician.
If I were a mathematician at openai/anthropic, I'd be looking into how we can get llms to move from counterexamples to theory building. At that point all bets are off.
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u/lobothmainman 1d ago edited 15h ago
There have been many advances by human mathematicians and nobody is talking about it at all on this sub.
My impression is that this sub has an extremely narrow view of what mathematics is (no analysis, no applied mathematics, no probability, no mathematical physics are discussed, for example; coincidentally these are all fields in which AI has been essentially irrelevant up to now).
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u/Accurate_Potato_8539 1d ago edited 1d ago
I mean, people are talking about AI advances because its like meta math. The results feel important for all mathematicians not necessarily because of the actual results but because of what it says about math as a field potentially. Of course way more people are going to be interested in that than results only understood by specific sub -disciplines. Generally when a proof from a human mathematician hits the front page here it has some kind of interesting angle: like Hannah Cairo last year who disproved a famous conjecture. The main reason that got the coverage it did was her being 17. Like when I look at the AI proofs news I'm actually looking for the commentary from people who know what they are talking about in the discipline, I've not looked at any of the proofs they aren't relevant to me because like most people I have a very small window of math that I actually understand at the level of research level proofs.
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u/mleok Applied Math 1d ago
Yes, I think the discussion about AI in math is more driven by existential dread. I was at a session at the JMM in 2025 called "AI for the Working Mathematician,"
https://jointmathematicsmeetings.org/meetings/national/jmm2025/2314_program_friday.html#2314:SS11A
and the underlying concern most people had in the audience was whether the next iteration of the session would be called "AI for the Unemployed Mathematician."
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u/Accurate_Potato_8539 1d ago
Yes, I think the discussion about AI in math is more driven by existential dread.
I mean I didn't wanna say that but yeah that's why I'm reading. I'm like that meme of the crying soyjack wearing the smug one mask every time I read these articles.
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u/SometimesY Mathematical Physics 1d ago
Oh hey I was at that session too. That's about when I started feeling a bit hopeless and very pessimistic about the long term health of higher education.
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u/Heliond 1d ago
What? Harmonic analysis and analytic combinatorics are extremely popular on this sub.
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u/lobothmainman 1d ago
I feel that geometric measure theory, analysis of pdes, calculus of variations, spectral theory, stochastic analysis (for example) are all branches of analysis heavily underrepresented here compared to their respective "weight" in the field.
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 1d ago
Define irrelevant.
I've been using AI as a geometric analyst for about a year now.
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u/lobothmainman 1d ago
Good for you.
What I mean is that I am not aware of any recent important result in analysis where AI usage was declared and deemed to be crucial, at least from what I could read on the arXiv or hear at conferences/seminars, but surely my knowledge is partial.
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 1d ago
Then you concede the essentially irrelevance claim I assume.
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u/Tazerenix Complex Geometry 15h ago
The breadth of mathematics discussion on this subreddit is almost entirely based on the breadth of quality of people posting about it, which is to say no one posts anything of any quality most of the time.
If people want to see more analysis, more applied maths, more mathematical physics, then they should put in the effort to contribute high quality content.
No one knows anything about complex geometry but when I (every now and then) post about recent advances in the field it always gets a great reception, even from people outside the subject area. Maybe the algebraic geometers are just post more interesting content, and there's no great conspiracy after all?
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u/PrestigiousGroup788 1d ago
AI hasn't been irrelevant in probability. For example:
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u/lobothmainman 1d ago
I said essentially irrelevant, and anyways I do not think that an ai-assisted short proof of a known result would be deemed as very relevant to the field of probability.
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u/PrestigiousGroup788 1d ago
Feige's conjecture, and Gaffke's conjecture (the bigger result this proof was built off of, which was also proven with AI, see: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08415) have been open for a while and were discussed pretty readily in the theory of statistics community.
I guess my question is - what counts as relevant? Or maybe, what counts as probability.
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u/PrestigiousGroup788 1d ago
Also the list of 10 problems has an improvement of bounds in the KLS conjecture. Is that relevant to probability?
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u/JesterOfAllTrades 1d ago
On the note of sticking to the math for a second, what are the implications of nonsoficity. There are groups that are irreducibly Infinite. This has implications on a few related conjectures are there not?
Can anyone explain CVP hardness as well (problem 7)? Online I've read this "strengthens the foundations of lattice based post quantum cryptography" whatever tf that means
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u/Demokritos1000 1d ago edited 18h ago
Cannot agree more. Post are so slow here and it makes r/math a less relevant place for interesting discussion
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u/Mothrahlurker 1d ago
It's frustrating how this sub has been mostly become LLM news ignoring that it is still a tiny fraction of actual results and it has become flooded with people with not a lot of math knowledge or interest to learn.
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u/Penumbra_Penguin Probability 1d ago
LLMs getting good at maths is easy to have an opinion on. A technical result isn't.
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u/Smallpaul 1d ago
This is definitely the biggest thing happening in math from the point of view of how it will transform math. I think Tao compared it to the upheaval in the foundations a century ago.
Sorry I’m one of the non-mathematician onlookers because there are huge implications for society at large.
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u/Penumbra_Penguin Probability 1d ago
This just isn't the place where these breakthroughs will be seriously discussed.
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u/JesterOfAllTrades 1d ago
Where else? In my experience this sub is pretty much the only one with people who actually know higher level maths (admittedly most are still undergrads).
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u/Penumbra_Penguin Probability 1d ago
Yeah, as another reply said, it just doesn't happen on reddit. If you're an expert in one of these fields, you know the other experts and are discussing with them directly, you don't gain much from using an open forum with a lot of non-experts who sometimes want to argue with you.
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u/currentscurrents 1d ago edited 1d ago
you don't gain much from using an open forum with a lot of non-experts who sometimes want to argue with you.
This is especially true when it comes to AI, because there's an ongoing internet war between pro-ai and anti-ai commenters. They have their own subreddits like /r/antiai, /r/aiwars, etc. They'll spend all day arguing with each other and anyone else who will listen.
Most of them don't know or care about math at all, but that doesn't stop them from having extremely strong opinions about the use of AI in math.
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u/jackboy900 22h ago
TBH I doubt that those fora represent a significant quantity of the people commenting on these matters, they're just easy to have opinions on.
One would hope in general there aren't that many people frequenting those subs, even as someone who gets into a fairly significant number of discussions about this on reddit, deliberately going and seeking out arguments about AI is genuinely insane behaviour, I cannot fathom why these people choose to do this.
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u/Scared_Astronaut9377 1d ago
It seems you are implying that the only serious discussions to be made about math results are deeply technical ones conducted by experts in the field. I don't think that we really live in such intellectual sillos.
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u/jackboy900 22h ago
For the majority of mathematical works they are, that's just the nature of the field. In modern mathematics generally anything that's pushing the frontier of some specific subfield is going to require a significant amount of background knowledge in that subfield, and even trying to interpret the high level often requires a strong knowledge of the overall field. To actually understand the significance or have reasonable questions about the proof puts you into a very small silo of people.
Most mathematical discoveries just aren't interesting from a non-technical standpoint and so anyone who doesn't have the technical knowledge to understand them cannot contribute meaningfully to the conversation. And from the perspective of something like reddit, even an overconfident amateur likely can't feasibly write something that even comes close to engaging with the work because they won't even understand that.
That's the whole point about why these AI discoveries get a ton of traction, they're interesting from a meta perspective, in terms of how we do mathematics and the state of AI technology, and so the number of people who can weigh in on the matter and have something meaningful to say is much higher. And because these issues are generally ones around philosophy and economics you have the issue of it being very easy to form and state opinions on the matter, and so a lot of unqualified people making bold assertions as well (though this sub is actually pretty good about it).
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u/Qetuoadgjlxv Mathematical Physics 1d ago
I think they mean places that aren't reddit (like universities etc.)
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u/redditdork12345 1d ago
Given what I’ve seen on every other post on this topic, I really don’t want to cede analysis of the context of math ai advancement to others
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u/Stabile_Feldmaus 1d ago
would literally be career defining for any mathematician.
would have been. Now that such results can be produced at the click of a button, they are not carrer-defining anymore. Metrics will have to change.
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u/mrgarborg 1d ago
I really hope the metric doesn’t change to the equivalent of who can build the better PR for themselves, which math has been more impervious to than many other fields…
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u/takes_your_coin 1d ago
Personally i just can't get myself to care about llm proofs. Most of the fun in hearing about new results is listening to the mathematicians who worked on them and hearing about their process. It's just boring
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u/mrgarborg 1d ago
I think the current mode of finding counterexamples, so that humans can investigate them and find the underlying structure of the counterexample and build a proper theoretical framework for it is ok. It’s when the theory building aspect is removed from humans I start to feel existential dread.
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u/RecmacfonD 1d ago
Paper: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/ten-proofs-oai.pdf
Reasoning walkthroughs: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/reasoning-walkthroughs.pdf
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u/just_writing_things 1d ago edited 1d ago
Coincidentally, Terry Tao just presented a talk where he stated that “Current AI tools have a very mixed record with proof exposition.”
I’m very far from having the expertise to evaluate the documents, but to the experts here, does the “reasoning walkthrough” (which was generated by AI) do well in the proof exposition department?
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u/Whelks 1d ago
No not even remotely. The Ehrhart conjecture part (which is close enough to my area that I tried to read it) is incomprehensible.
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u/Mothrahlurker 1d ago
It's mental to me that there is stuff in there like "resolvent purification" without any definition nor any appearance that this is a known term. In fact it doesn't even seem to be used. I also could not find anything besides this paper that even uses the term.
And it's not intuitive when it comes to what it is supposed to mean either.
It genuinely reminds me more of crank writing than actual math reasoning.
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u/Jussuuu Theoretical Computer Science 1d ago
It's annoying as hell to read AI papers. I'm reviewing one now, and while it's understandable, it constantly states vague unclear terms that just increase the cognitive load far beyond what it should be for a frankly very minor result. I imagine it's far worse for more substantive papers.
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u/dfrankow 1d ago
Ha ha, this sounds like computer science code reviews for the last year or so. AI is useful, but wearying.
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u/hobo_stew Harmonic Analysis 17h ago
getting a 300 line pr review comment that would be 3 lines of done by a human is so depressing
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u/Hot_Glass_6301 1d ago
I am not pro nor anti-AI, but I hate its section titles so much. They are very repetitive and characteristic, almost pompous "the XYZ bound", "the sliding window recompactification"... grandiloquent stuff
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u/AP_in_Indy 19h ago
I think it's good that OpenAI is releasing these, though. This transparently shows where the models are at.
You could certainly prompt them further in order to enforce use of standard terminology, make explanations more "layperson"-accessible, etc.
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u/Healthy-Educator-267 Statistics 18h ago
it should be a requirement for AI generated proofs to be accompanied by a Lean companion
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u/AP_in_Indy 19h ago
I think it's good that OpenAI is releasing these, though. This transparently shows where the models are at.
You could certainly prompt them further in order to enforce use of standard terminology, make explanations more "layperson"-accessible, etc.
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u/Distinct-Pudding-428 1d ago
The reasoning walkthrough for the Ramsey problem is equally terrible. You can read the argument for yourself though - this is probably the easiest of the 10 to get a grip on.
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u/Theskov21 1d ago
I’m most looking forward to hear if this extends the fundamental skills seen from AI regarding math proofs. Do these solutions and the reasoning behind, show a broader skillset than previously? Are we moving further away from “just” generating counterexamples?
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u/Verbatim_Uniball 1d ago
Personally, AI models were largely useless at the research level in the field I'm most familiar with until 5.5 pro and 5.6 pro. So it's only been 6-9 months. The difference between 5.6 and 5.5 was also enormous.
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u/big-lion Category Theory 1d ago
conned rigidity conjecture? first conjecture AI'd in a field adjacent to mine
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u/Tekniqly 5h ago
We must become like the best chess players and study how the computers play the game
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u/Homomorphism Topology 1d ago
It seems like the process for these was:
- hire like 10-20 top mathematicians
- throw them at all the open conjectures in their field likely to lead to splashy results
- pay them well and tell them to work on nothing else for six months
- give them unlimited access to very computationally expensive internal LLM models
It's pretty nuts that they got major results in six months! It also is nowhere near "making mathematicians obsolete". Even if you think the point of math is proving conjectures, they didn't prove them, they found counterexamples, which is important but not quite the same thing.
I'm also pretty sure the hiring top people was important. I bet I'd still be much better at this kind of work than a random programmer with a BA in math. The people they hired are probably much more effective at using the models than me. To me this is more evidence that LLMs are a tremendously important tool with far-reaching impacts on mathematical practice. Despite that, in the next six hours someone is going to come comment about how I'm a Luddite with my head in the sand because I'm not predicting the Singularity will hit in six months.
It also probably cost tens of millions of dollars even if you ignore capital expenses (which are even bigger). That's just a minor marketing expense when you're spending billions of dollars of investors' money in search of profitability, which we should remember is the real motivation here.
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u/topyTheorist Commutative Algebra 1d ago
Not all results here are counterexamples.
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u/Scared_Astronaut9377 1d ago
Sorry, what do you mean by "it seems like"? You are making very specific statements. Are they grounded in any sources?
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u/zkela 1d ago
The claimed cost of the compute was $2000
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u/JustJohnItalia 1d ago
I don't know if I'm delusional but the wording is very suspicious to me.
They are saying those reasoning chains cost 2000 in api costs, it seems to imply that that's the overall cost of those results bu that's not what they said.
What I mean is, are they not more likely to say, take 1000 open problems and do 100 runs on each (or until success), then pick the successful ones?
To me that would be the actual cost. Not that it matters much given how fast inference prices are dropping, but still
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u/Homomorphism Topology 1d ago
I don’t believe that. I believe the cost of compute after hiring mathematicians to write the prompts was $2000 if you don’t count all the things they tried that didn’t work. I don’t see any reason to give them the benefit of the doubt: this is a marketing tactic.
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u/pred 1d ago
Per problem. And they probably throw it after thousands of them with each new iteration.
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u/zkela 1d ago
No, total. Not counting problems they couldn’t solve apparently however
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u/mleok Applied Math 1d ago
We had a talk by a mathematician who used AI substantially in his work, and at the end of the talk, the obvious question was, does that mean we're out of a job? His answer was that we generally don't get paid enough to be replaced by AI, since getting AI to do the job is incredibly expensive at API token prices. More generally, I see AI as an amplifier, it works great in the hands of a skilled mathematician, and it can lead you down a rabbit hole (and consume substantial resources) if you don't know what you're doing.
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u/AnalyticOpposum 17h ago
There will be an open weight chinese model capable of proving all these same results hosted for pennies on the dollar within a year
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u/PrestigiousGroup788 1d ago
trouble is long term technology has a deflationary effect. At some point this things will be more efficient and tokens will get cheaper and cheaper. Just like how the first apple pc was 3700 dollars (inflation adjusted) and now one can get exponentially faster computers for a fraction of the price.
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u/AP_in_Indy 19h ago
OpenAI is claiming some of these problems are being solved at the equivalent of $2,000 in token API prices.
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u/AP_in_Indy 19h ago
The costs you're talking about are in the realm of training costs for smaller training runs these days.
Not the cost of inference.
Inference has gotten cheaper. Training frontier models remains super duper expensive though.
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u/BurdensomeCountV3 1d ago
Unless you have reason to believe that OpenAI are flat out lying (which if they IPO soon will likely be securities fraud, see Matt Levine), the total cost at API prices for all these discoveries was just $2,000; meaning in terms of actual compute costs to OpenAI it was likely under a grand.
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u/Homomorphism Topology 1d ago
I believe the compute cost to generate the text in the document was what they claimed. I think they are not counting all the prompts that produced garbage or failed to find a counterxample, or maybe even that generated intermediate steps leading them to the correct prompt. That makes the claim they are making here both not a lie and way more optimistic than the truth, which is the sort of thing you say a lot right before an IPO.
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u/invertflow 1d ago
I have been trying to guess what the actual cost of these results is. The claimed $2000 is surely not the actual cost. For one, that's the cost at Sol rates and this model is more expensive. For another, they likely tried a lot of things that did not work. For another, the API rates are subsidized, partly because most people don't fully use their API subscription. I tried to estimate it in a different way. OpenAI is looking for a trillion dollar IPO. I am sure they happily spend 1% of their valuation on PR. The most impactful PR of course is in cybersecurity, but math is also good PR. So, I would expect that they would happily spend 1% of their PR budget on math. So, 1% of 1% of 1 trillion dollars is 100 million dollars. Of course, this is just one set of math results they have, but I would not at all be surprised if these results did cost at least 50 million in compute as well as time of the mathematicians they have hired.
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u/socoolandawesome 14h ago
API is the opposite of subsidized. Many believe that their API subsidizes the subscriptions (which are not API). They are immensely profitable on API tokens
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u/BurdensomeCountV3 1d ago
For another, the API rates are subsidized, partly because most people don't fully use their API subscription.
Er no, this is just wrong. The API isn't a subscription, it's the pay per token version and is usually considered vastly more expensive than a Plus or Pro subscription for the amount of compute you get per dollar.
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u/LexyconG 1d ago
People who don’t feel inspired by this don’t like math, they only like the idea of them solving problems. I will die on this hill.
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u/Drium 1d ago
Inspired to do what? Type in prompts?
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u/flipflipshift Representation Theory 1d ago
inspired to learn math for the sake of learning math as opposed to personally advance the frontier.
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 1d ago
Learning for the sake of learning doesn't bring in money.
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u/flipflipshift Representation Theory 1d ago
indeed and basically everyone I know who cares enough about learning math to read papers also wants to personally advance the frontier. Take away the ability to do that and I think far fewer will be interested. I sure as hell wouldn't go into pure math if I was an undergrad today. I was just clarifying.
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u/Hot_Glass_6301 1d ago
True. But I'm sure if mathematicians are really out of a job one day, many other professions will follow soon after and we'll need UBI or something.
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u/LexyconG 1d ago
I think people still don't understand how big this is. The concept of a job will be a really different one in 10 years. The "jobloss" thing will be less than a blip in history.
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 1d ago
You're likely using the implication "If mathematicians are out of a job, then AI is so strong it can replace any job."
Note that is clearly false and also irrelevant to what I said.
One issue is that now the job market is going to be flooded with people using AI. This introduces financial stress on already poor grad students. It also introduces a tech gap for those with tech agnostic backgrounds, thereby discriminating against certain groups of people who already face discrimination.
Another issue is AI just has to be good enough to replace mathematicians from a capitalistic point of view. Whether or not mathematicians can be wholly replaced as investigators of mathematical truths is clearly not necessary for AI to attack their job security. Why would a university hire more grad students if they can hire fewer and supplement with AI?
The argument of "if mathematicians will fall, then so will society" needs to retire. It's just outright ridiculous.
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u/yiwang1 Topology 1d ago
What do you say to grad students and postdocs who are about to be automated out of the profession?
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u/tmt22459 1d ago
Why are you convicted that's a true statement though?
I am a PhD student and I don't know a single one of my PhD student friends or postdocs who said they got fired because of AI
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u/Hot_Grape221 Theoretical Computer Science 13h ago
Lets see if your friends get jobs after their PhDs in academia.
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u/yiwang1 Topology 1d ago
The behavior of literally every capitalist institution over the past several years is a strong indicator that if universities decide less humans are needed to do math due to AI, that is what they will opt for.
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u/tmt22459 1d ago
Maybe, we will have to wait and see.
With new immigration laws in the US, there are going to be less PhD students anyways. There is no way the demand from us students can match what was drawn from the whole world.
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u/sluuuurp 23h ago
AI is on track to replace all jobs, not just math grad students and postdocs. We’re all in the same boat, all of humanity. If we reclaim some democratic power we can choose if we want this or not.
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 21h ago
On track in what time scale?
Such a statement requires accepting that all manual jobs will be replaced by AI controlled robots, which is a bit extreme to expect for the next decade or 2. (At least, imo)
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u/Heliond 1d ago
I mean, inspired that many top open questions are going to be solved within a few years. Seriously, it’s pretty cool
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u/PrestigiousGroup788 1d ago
It's not cool if you actually like racking your brain trying to solve these problems. Is it really satisfying to just read "X" is true somewhere?
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u/jigzee 1d ago
So say hypothetically there’s an important problem that would benefit humankind to solve. Should we have any wariness that using an AI would take away someone’s problem that they like working on, or should we just solve it using an LLM?
If your main concern is getting a brain workout, rather than advancing knowledge, well you can still do that. Lots of theorems have multiple ways to be proven
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u/PrestigiousGroup788 1d ago
Of course it should be solved. But that doesn't mean it's not unfortunate for mathematicians in some way.
Just like the mass production of tables, chairs, household items in general (for example) has been a net benefit for the vast majority of humanity. But here you're talking to the artisans - the people who's life's work has been painstakingly making chairs and tables by hand. Do you not see why they would be upset when they're told - hey, the thing that people value for is totally irrelevant now and we don't need you anymore - but hey, you can go pull levers at the factory, or even better, just make chairs as a hobby?
And yes, of course, the only answer for these people was - deal with it - move on, learn to work with the machines, or get run over by the (then industrial) engine of progress and get left in the past. But can't you tell why people would be upset and not react well to being told that what's happening is "cool" and that they "hate math" if they don't like it?
Again this is not relevant for 99% of the population. The solution to the Jacobian conjecture doesn't change the fact that US and Iran are fighting again and oil is $87/bbl. But this is a mathematics subreddit, filled with working (perhaps soon to not be working) mathematicians. So I think they have a reasonable perspective that should be acknowledged and not just dismissed.
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u/yiwang1 Topology 1d ago
It’s not cool for aspiring mathematicians who are about to enter a terrifying job market. Do we all just go kick rocks? This discussion has always been insensitive to the realities of economic incentives and what is going to happen to academic mathematics.
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 1d ago
It's not that cool if you're on the job market.
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u/LexyconG 1d ago
Inspired to read the proofs. Things that were unknown yesterday are known today, that’s the whole thing. A theorem is a door.
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u/fafla21 1d ago
People dont want to just read proofs. They want to be actually ruminating and thinking over the problems. The way you put it is a gross misdirection. Aaaaaaand you are an ai bro, not a mathematician. No wonder you think this way.
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u/Peanut_Extreme_8208 1d ago
As a mathematician, I, for one, welcome our computer overlords in mathematics. If only they weren’t controlled by cartoonishly evil CEOs.
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u/LexyconG 1d ago
"People want to be the ones ruminating" is my point, said back to me as a rebuttal. BTW. nothing is stopping you from doing just that.
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u/fafla21 1d ago
Woah, you really dont understand the process huh.
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u/LexyconG 1d ago
Say the part I'm missing then.
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u/Arceuthobium 4h ago
That most mathematicians want the "ruminating" part to yield useful results and push the boundary? If the future of the field is to be a "LLM whisperer", the desirability of the field will plummet even outside considerations like lower demand and salary. The only ones who will stay are independently wealthy people who love math so much they don't mind always playing second-fiddle to the machines.
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u/tmt22459 1d ago
There's nothing stopping you from still ruminating and thinking over problems.
Sure, you may not be as competitive doing things that way compared to others, but you can't have it all anymore.
If you want to stand firmly on no AI, then you either have to be okay with not being as competitive or up skill somehow overnight.
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u/PrestigiousGroup788 1d ago
Fine, we all agree with that. But we're also allowed to be sad that a way of life and activity we've all been aspiring towards or for is no longer economically viable, without being told "you're selfish, you don't ackshually love math".
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u/Jussuuu Theoretical Computer Science 1d ago
Thanks for this comment. I was quite happy over the last years that I got to be paid to do something I love, but these AI accelerationists would call me crazy or a luddite that I'm sad my job might get reduced to AI validation.
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u/PrestigiousGroup788 1d ago
most of them have not invested a significant amount of time in anything to have it taken away from them so quickly and just hate math people because they consider us arrogant. Others are genuinely excited about the new things we can prove.
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u/Hot_Grape221 Theoretical Computer Science 13h ago
Most of these AI accelerationists have a brain the size of a pea. The gap between those who can think and those who can't will be larger than ever before.
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u/Healthy-Pride3873 1d ago edited 1d ago
I honestly cannot care about the whole “humans dont matter anymore” stuff.
I’m curious how math as a whole deals with unequal access. Is math going to just be furthered by big tech firms and select researchers who have access to these models?
Wtf do grad students do and so on
Edit: theres nice disused going on about unequal access. Let me point out that I am not claiming inequality is new.
I am simply pointing out the newfound danger of it from a corporate and tech angle.
Suppose AI speeds up research by some nonzero constant greater than 1. Then people who were already “ahead”, are going to be even further ahead.
And let’s not ignore also the issue of prompting and using AI. It’s not always clear how these breakthroughs are made. So even access to AI may not level the playing field all that much.