I've been spending 3 weeks, as a non mathemetician, chasing down a particular, very simply-stated, but secretly quite complex problem, and AI has been _so incredibly helpful_, not just in making progress on it, and doing obvious stuff like formalizing in lean, doing literature searches, reading through 10 or 15 papers and summarizing the results for me and how they apply to what I'm doing, giving me enough of an introduction to _entire fields_, that I can talk intelligently about it (I've had email correspondence with a couple of professional mathematicians in a few different fields about it, who agreed that it's an interesting, simple, but difficult problem). I've gone from "this should be easy", to "okay, I've almost got a proof", to "this is impossible", to literally just nailing down a few remaining sub-cases out of an infinite family.

I don't want to call anyone out, but I emailed one fairly famous mathemetician, and he literally said: "This is very interesting, I thought about it for a while, couldn't figure it out, but I thought ChatGPT had an interesting response..." and he linked me to his chatgpt transcript... (which, was actually helpful, because he asked it a better question than I was asking).

I have a suspicion that math will quite soon be exactly like programming and fall to the same machinery that coding is.

One thing that I noticed is that a common workflow I had was isolating hard subquestions in a self contained way and then "surveying" multiple different LLMs in a totally clean context. They would often say: "Oh, this is a obvious example of such-and-such" and immediately clear the barrier.