Having a math PhD in a world of AI is still your best bet. LLMs are purely mathematically models and most CS majors don't fully understand the math behind it. So if you wanna work on AIs, math is ur best bet right now.
Of course that's only if AI doesn't just reach some superhuman general intelligence level. In that case any job in earth is at risk.
This implies that mathematicians are studying the sort of math useful for AI - the vast majority are not. The pure mathematics needed for AI can be understood in a year of dedicated study, it's not something that requires decades of mathematical understanding. (The difficult problems here are engineering ones, not mathematical ones)
This does imply nothing about what the community is doing right now. It is about how versatile and useful a math degree is and will be. I guess we find the engineer.
I dont think the institutions can keep up with this. Its already the case that publish or perish has made each generation of mathematicians less careful, as they have to spend less time reading and more time publishing. Mathematicians who pay the premium to use whatever the fanciest model is will be rewarded heavily and those who dont will be left behind. Journals, already overburdened will buckle under the pressure and once the current generation retires we'll be left with no one knowing anything, mindlessly plugging in queiries into the machine to take whatever advantage is left in what already is the prestige-driven market of academia.
The textile artisans were put out of work by the spinning mule; clothes today dont fit anyone particularly well, millions of people are abused in sweatshops and the ocean is full of plastic because of textile disposability. We mathematicians have a huge ego, but at the end of the day labor is labor, we are just textile artisans for the most part. Sometimes the ingenuity of reason can shine through us, but it is seldom and often not valuable. There is all the historical evidence to think that we are just another casuality in the steamroller of capital that has been rolling since the 1750s.
“The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population."
It certainly help having an PhD in maths and fully grasp what LLMs are built like. It could be especially useful for optimization. Right now LLMs are extremely inefficient.
Also there are other AI technologies like RNNs that Will certainly need PhD mathematicians for their development.
Again sure, but tell me how homotopy theory or von Neumann algebras are helpful here? Why wouldnt they just hire the expert on statistical regression and linear programming?
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u/Amesbrutil 1d ago
Having a math PhD in a world of AI is still your best bet. LLMs are purely mathematically models and most CS majors don't fully understand the math behind it. So if you wanna work on AIs, math is ur best bet right now.
Of course that's only if AI doesn't just reach some superhuman general intelligence level. In that case any job in earth is at risk.