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Comment by ryanar | Hacker News Reader

Are they actually producing new math? In the most recent ACM issue there was an article about testing AI against a math bench that was privately built by mathematicians, and what they found is that even though AI can solve some problems, it never truly has come up with something novel and new in mathematics, it is just good at drawing connections between existing research and putting a spin on it.

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I'm not accusing you in particular, but I feel like there's a lot of circular reasoning around this point. Something like: AI can't discover "new math" -> AI discovers something -> since it was discovered by AI it must not be "new math" -> AI can't discover "new math"

For example, there was a recent post here about GPT-5.4 (and later some other models) solving a FrontierMath open problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497757

That would definitely be considered "new math" if a human did it, but since it was AI people aren't so sure.

There is a kind of rubrik I use on stuff like this. If LLMs are discovering new math, why have I only read one or two articles where it's happening? Wouldn't it be happening with regularity?

The most obvious example of this thinking is, if LLMs are replacing developers, why us open ai still hiring?

I can only say that at family meetings, I hear people talk about contracting with a shop that used to have 4 web designers, but now it's 1 guy, delivering 4x faster than before.

So devs are being replaced.

Nah AI is not replacing people! /s

And other stories people tell themselves to sleep better at night

Why aren't they delivering 4x more work? Does the world no longer need software?

It's finding constructions and counterexamples. That's different from finding new proof techniques, but still extremely useful, and still gives way to novel findings.

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