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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

It's quite the irony that in the end he says

> Although the current generation of models is trained to complete tasks rather than to enrich our understanding, and today’s AI companies are misaligned with the goals of the mathematical community, I hope that with time we’ll find ways to use these tools in harmony with human research.

while citing "A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics" [1], which condemns exactly the thing he is doing himself: Mindlessly producing theorems without a corresponding human understanding of the underlying proofs.

1: https://mathandai.org/

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Perhaps you and I read this document differently. This is not a “famous problem”, I am not a “major AI company”, and I am genuinely interested in increasing mathematical understanding. To the last point, here is a comment from a mathematician who co-authored the paper that my proof is largely built upon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49761718

The happy case here is that my obtuse proof leads to a concise and illuminating mathematical proof, which is exactly my hope for the endeavour. I think this could then be a positive example of AI/human and amateur/professional collaboration.

What would a positive example look like to you? What do you think the manifesto argues for?

Okay, at least the comment from the mathematician sounds positive.

Positive example: Someone is 1) independently interested in a particular conjecture, 2) he lets an LLM prove and explain it, 3) he ends up fully understanding the LLM proof and is then able to phrase it in his own words.

It is a famous problem!!!!!!!!!! You literally understand nothing about the culture you’re stomping all over.

I may be wrong here but my impression is that surreal numbers in general are kind of a niche area that hasn’t enjoyed a ton of interest. Additionally, this specific conjecture did not have any “prizes” attached to it and was not on any list of famous problems I could find. It’s even difficult to Google. What precisely do you mean by it being a famous problem?

It’s a problem that someone could describe in a talk and attribute to a prominent mathematician and which would have resulted in significant career opportunities for having solved in 2021. You don’t understand this because you don’t care that you’re degrading the tiny chance people had to actually learn mathematics.

Edit I apologize to Dan Abramov for venting my frustrations about things outside of either of our control and unfairly using him as a punching bag. He seems to be an intelligent person and I hope he continues learning mathematics using whatever tools he sees fit, including AI. It was wrong of me to do this and I will take a break from this website for one week.

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