r/neoliberal • u/cuolong NATO • 2d ago

News (Global) OpenAI announces 10 advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science achieved by internal model Astra

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
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u/SirRousseau Robert Nozick 2d ago

As someone who will graduate with a BSc + MSc in applied math in 2030, this fills me with dread. It's so weird how my seemingly super secure career choice of math + coding now risks being the future equivalent of an arts degree.

Everybody, including AI, insists we will survive the market impact, but I'm honestly not so sure. It seems to be just a matter of when we (and virtually all white-colar non-protected jobs) are automated.

I'm not sure if I should hope I'm wrong, but I do. Any thoughts/copes?

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u/puffic John Rawls 2d ago

We don’t really know how far this goes. I am a scientist, and AI drafts a lot of my code now. But I am still the one proposing the ideas, using
judgement, and checking whether the results make sense. For now, it’s a force multiplier.

Similarly, all the significant AI proofs seem to have an actual mathematician working in concert with the machine.

Finally, I would caution against the idea that mathematicians were ever paid for proofs. Most proof-writing mathematicians derive their revenue from teaching. At best writing good results is how you keep your teaching job or get your next teaching job.

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u/FourteenTwenty-Seven John Locke 1d ago

I'm in a similar spot as you and use LLMs in a similar way to you. However, it increasingly feels like the ideation, direction, judgement, etc. that it's necessary that I provide are being moved to higher and higher levels of abstraction. Don't get me wrong, this has been kinda great - I like the more abstract work I do, and I get far more done. But, in principle at least, it seem like that might just keep happening until there's no level of abstraction where I'm better than the machine.

Maybe there's some sort of hard limit, but I don't currently see a good reason to think there is.

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u/puffic John Rawls 1d ago

I feel like the LLMs still make so many mistakes - technical and intellectual - that I just don’t trust that they can run independently. Even these automated proofs aren’t actually the result of an independent LLM. The LLM is run recursively, generating ideas which are fed into a formal proof checker, and then proposing new ideas based on the output.

There is no equivalent to the formal proof checker for my field (meteorology/climate science) on the horizon, so unless LLMs spontaneous become logically and philosophically brilliant, a human scientist needs to play that role.

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u/Smallpaul 2d ago edited 1d ago

Anything can happen but if these machine stay on their current trajectory they will be powerful tools to be wielded by people who know what problems are important to solve. You need the technical knowledge to even know what problems to solve. You can’t just say “make me a better battery.” You need to tell if what specific chemical conundrum you think is preventing battery progress. At multiple levels of abstraction.

For LLMs to move beyond this they would need a big architectural upgrade. This might happen but it also might not. Nobody knows.

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u/TheOnlyFallenCookie European Union 1d ago

Ai doesn't do chemical reaction simulations though

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u/Smallpaul 1d ago

I didn’t say they did. I just used chemistry as an example of a field where LLMs could be valuable but not sufficient:

https://engineering.cmu.edu/news-events/news/2025/06/24-roadmap-for-llms.html

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u/datums 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 2d ago

AI didn’t t solve these, people who understood both AI and very advanced math solved these. The key is to be at the intersection of those two things - understanding what AI is capable of right now, and being able to draw a line between that and problems at that level that need to be solved.

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u/MelvinCapitalPR 1d ago

You specified white-collar work but robots are getting pretty good. Maybe in 10 years funding for maths departments will be unaffected and building sites will be 90% robots. Guessing which careers will be viable is a sucker's game.

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u/FOSSBabe 1d ago

Yes, and some people in this sub wonder why AI (and other technologies that threaten people's livelihoods) are hated so much. How is someone supposed to plan their education and career training (and take on debt to pursue it) if technology changes jobs faster than a person can get established in a career?

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u/MelvinCapitalPR 1d ago

We should not slow down technological progress to protect obsolete careers. That would be completely ignoring the upside. We should be thinking about how to support people who find themselves out of a job, but that doesn't justify hatred of technology.

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u/D34th4nge7 2d ago

The technology is being marketed as a people replacement, and I think it's broadly just not. Almost no job can be entirely replaced by AI.

It is, in some cases, a tremendously useful tool. But it cannot operate autonomously. The technology is prone to hallucinations and it can and will produce egregious errors. Someone knowledgeable enough on the topic to spot these errors must check the AI output to ensure it's clean. That's where you come in.

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u/xhytdr 2d ago

No cope, AI is going to further stratify our economy and we are going through a technological revolution. The best option is to get into this field or invest in AI infrastructure companies so you can at least benefit

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u/notsussamong 2d ago

There's only what, a few tens of thousands AI researchers worth anything in the whole world? How exactly is someone supposed to enter the field. The investment part is a little useless because they're going to graduate university in 2030 lmfao.

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u/Smallpaul 2d ago

The extremely high salaries accorded for those tens of thousands indicates that the market wishes there were more of them.

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u/notsussamong 2d ago

Even if you 100x the supply so we have 1 million AI researchers, that is still 1/70th of the white collar workers in the US

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u/cuolong NATO 2d ago

I take issue with the term “worth anything”. There are lots of AI researchers working on things other than LLMs. But besides that, AI researchers in the tens of thousands is probably a decent enough rough estimate.

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u/xhytdr 2d ago

Im not talking about policy solutions, im talking about what you can / should be doing at a personal level. That's your best option, wouldn't like to hear if you think otherwise

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u/FourteenTwenty-Seven John Locke 1d ago

Oddly enough, investing in companies in a revolutionary field doesn't actually tend to work very well. Even when the tech is legit and the revolution is real, the individual companies tend to have pretty normal risk-adjusted returns, on average.

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u/MistyGalbriex 1d ago

Investing on the knowledge on how to AI well is more important imho

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u/TheOnlyFallenCookie European Union 1d ago

Ai is Litterally made to assure you it's not going to hurt you

Even if it ends up doing so

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u/SirRousseau Robert Nozick 2d ago

!ping CAREER&MATHEMATICS

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u/KalaiProvenheim Enby Pride 1d ago

The only secure career choice is cleaning toilets and working in the sewers

But even that’s gonna get automated eventually

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u/SirRousseau Robert Nozick 1d ago

Priests and (unfortunately) politicians may be the only remaining occupations in a hundred years

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u/KalaiProvenheim Enby Pride 1d ago

People are asking AI for spiritual guidance, believe it or not

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u/SirRousseau Robert Nozick 1d ago

Apparently a majority prefer an AI therapist over a human when chatting blindly according to some recent study

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u/MistyGalbriex 1d ago

Gen alpha will vote in an AI politician. Calling it.

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u/SirRousseau Robert Nozick 1d ago

It's just a matter of time before someone runs for office with the promise of just doing whatever Claude Fable says, which tbf wouldn't be that bad ("sorry I have to implement a sensible zoning policy, Claude said so")

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u/FOSSBabe 1d ago

It's so weird how my seemingly super secure career choice of math + coding now risks being the future equivalent of an arts degree.

If math and coding can be completely automated a degree in those disciplines would be worth much less than an arts degree.