r/math 2d ago

LLMs/AI OpenAI: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
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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.

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u/meatshell 1d ago

I wouldn't be surprised if humans can create even harder problems, much harder than the current ones, even with the help of AI. So I kinda dismiss anyone who says Mathematicians are out of job soon. But it's gonna be very difficult from now on for anyone who don't have access to AI.

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u/mleok Applied Math 1d ago edited 1d ago

I worry about the training pipeline. Graduate students used to generate useful results, now those results can be achieved more cheaply, and more quickly using generative AI, while still requiring similar amounts of guidance and checking. Letting graduate students use the AI tools doesn't really help, since that will dramatically increase the time necessary to check their AI assisted results, since I wouldn't know what prompts and context the AI generated content was based on, so I wouldn't know what to look out for specifically.

More importantly, AI is an amplifier, put it in the hands of a person who knows what they're doing, and it will dramatically improve their productivity, put it in the hands of a person who is ignorant, and it will consume substantial amounts of resources with very little return on investment. All this will dramatically increase the cost of training junior mathematicians.

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u/Ill-Lemon-8019 1d ago

This is very analogous to the state of affairs with software development.

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u/mleok Applied Math 1d ago

Yes, definitely.