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Comment by bgwalter | Hacker News Reader

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Because he is smart enough to use the existing (frontier) tools to get good results and create a sort of collaborative environment that is novel for research maths.

As for collaboration I meant: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2024/09/25/a-pilot-project-in... The issue with horizontal scaling of maths research is trust: if you don't know the author, it is more work to verify their work, especially non-formal proofs. Lean4 enables large projects be split up into pieces where lean can validate each intermediate result, so a much broader group of people can contribute pieces without jeopardizing the overall soundness.

Collaborative environment meaning that any PFY employed by the "AI" providers can read your most intimate thought processes and keep track of embarrassing failures or misconceptions.

The embarrassing failures or misconceptions of math experts with regards to research level mathematics? Definitely a serious problem.

Though by your "Perelman and Wiles didn't need "AI" assistance" comment, you'd surely be there on the sidelines to ridicule them for each and every single one. I guess maybe that's where your concerns are coming from?

I can practically see how these concerns of yours would suddenly evaporate if they started using self-hosted models instead... ... yeah, right, who are we kidding?

If mathematicians aren't occasionally saying something that's obviously wrong to a 300-level student, are they really pushing the envelope? I'm just a programmer, but I find that my, and my coworkers, biggest insights always come right after we've said something seriously dumb.

"Progress by crashing into things then putting the broken pieces back together" is surprisingly effective.

Indeed. Who’s to say whether Wiles would have used AI assistance if it had, you know, existed, in 1994.

Wiles's initial presentation of the proof had a serious flaw that killed the whole thing until he found a workaround. I don't remember how long it took him to get out of the jam, but I'm sure he would have handed his credit card to the Devil himself if he thought it might help.

People who don't take advantage of the best available tools and techniques don't get to that level to begin with.

Thankfully it's mathematics, so people powerscaling their idols, deifying them at the detriment of others, and putting terms into quotes mockingly, is not what determines whether results hold or not. Perhaps the only field not fundamentally shackled by this type of quackery, even if people try their hardest from time to time to make it so.

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