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Comment by youoy | Hacker News Reader

Should I read this as the big labs trying to move maths forward? Or the big labs trying to use professional mathematitians as (cheap?) Labour for validating LLM outputs? On yesterdays "An Alien Mind" post from openAI they openly said that maths is not a priority for them, so I personally know what to think...

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Hey! Thanks for answering, i appreciate it. Dont get me wrong, this is what you should be doing, understanding what these models are good (and most importantly bad) for. My observation is that this is very very valuable for the labs, and in an ideal world they should be paying you to do this, not just the tokens and "prize" for the winners.

I am also a bit frustrated seeing maths go in the direction of prompt enginnering. I am afraid of a world were a math phd student cannot go one week thinking about a problem without prompting an LLM to give him/her an invented answer. Something is lost along the way.

For me maths is not Lean, or formal systems, or an agent reasoning about formal systems to join literature from different fields. I see the value of it, but i think it will make it way more difficult for students (and profesional mathematitians) to see beyond that. And i see us heading into a reality were those who think like me will in practice remain a minority for quite a few years/decades because the low hanging fruit of LLMs will be to vast to ignore.

Agreed. I think we share the same concerns about LLM use. We just drew different conclusions.

Mathathon's goal is to reshape rather than stop LLM use. Can we set high standards for LLM use? Can we highlight the roles of a mathematician beyond proof generation? Can we redesign our incentives to promote these standards and roles?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on how to improve this event. We're very open to criticisms.

Thanks again for answering! As I told you I think the event is a good idea from your side. I would try to go beyond proof prompting and verification, and discussing the questions that you wrote above is the way to go.

I am mathematitian that is working as a software engineer. I have see first hand what these models are doing to SE. Its not that writting well thought, and compact code is not a good idea anymore, or that it doesnt beat LLM code, but that the people that see the value are a minority. If you write a piece of old school code in an LLM repo, it doesnt really make a difference, because old school code requires a team effort.

In maths the situation is not exactly the same. Probably reading a good piece of well thought math inside a book of LLM assisted proofs will stand out so much for the carefull reader that there will be no question about the value.

However, if the only way to get a position at a university is to print as much papers as possible, then who would risk printing 1 paper instead of 5 for doing old school maths?

So the solution to this is building a culture and community effort around these topics. And for that the topics need to be openly discussed.

Good luck with the organisation! And thanks again for the conversation!

Obviously the latter - this fact is betrayed by how the page lists the S^6 complex structure result, which was released as a 100 page barely readable mess (in fact even this might be too charitable), as still "unverified". Clearly a situation labs would like to avoid for future claimed results.

> Or the big labs trying to use professional mathematitians as (cheap?) Labour for validating LLM outputs?

I am told AGI has been achieved. If so, shouldnt these systems be out and about on their own ? Looking at 1st proof submissions in batch 2 it is clear that fully autonomous AI systems have a long way to go.

AI harnessing human labor with the incentive of 2M in free tokens is the way my skeptic eye sees it, or humans being duped as reverse-centaurs.

> I am told AGI has been achieved. If so, shouldnt these systems be out and about on their own

This seems like a strawman. It’s certainly not consensus that AGI has been achieved and I don’t think the people participating in this event feel like there is no value in human input or steering the AI.

It's very clear that the AI still has no motivation beyond its prompts. Humans can mostly outsource their thinking today across a wide variety of topics, but they still need to express their desires.

Probably many mathematicians want answers to the questions from the page:

> This AI advancement raises the following questions: (a) How much can AI speed up the process from ideation to peer-reviewed publication? (b) What is the role of a mathematician when AI can solve conjectures faster?

and the big AI companies agreed to sponsor them to find out because it is good publicity for the companies.

Yeah it's a bit of a tricky situation. It's almost like a bribe in a sense.

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