Its by choice. Mathematicians still can use AI to "achieve the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight"
This is a litmus test for the effective altruists in AI labs: fashion or conviction? The social pressure is to slow down and let the guild keep its norms a few more years. But what's clearly best for humanity is to push forward violently and leave them in the dust. A Fields medalist's feelings are not more important than the wellbeing of the planet.
They are depressed because what's being destroyed is mathematics, actually.
> Five years of guided computer-aided math could improve billions of lives or solve global warming outright through cheap clean energy.
This is complete BS, math doesn't solve climate change or save life, that's a category error. The purpose of math is to help us build understanding of the mathematical objects and that's it.
Sometimes, after much distillation to the academic world, this understanding is later being leverage by other scientific field, but that's a very rare event when it happens. And it's not how other science progress.
> This is a litmus test for the effective altruists
EA has always been a lie to justify short term individual greed by hypothetical shared future benefits.
his core argument that is LLMs (and specifically LLMs owned and gated by corporations was my read), while able to solve problems, do not contribute to this practice of knowledge building. solving problems is just one piece, and the mathematics community ingests problems and new methods, iterates and thinks on them, and then produces new ideas, methods, etc. this is what he is defining as progress, and solving things like millenium problems are markers of this progress.