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Comment by schrodinger | Hacker News Reader

It’s not. Intent matters.

Imagine there's a very advanced crossword club where anybody can join and take a stab at these crosswords for the love of solving puzzles. Many of them are so difficult that no one's been able to solve them yet, but we know they're all solvable.

One day, someone comes along with a super advanced crossword solver application, and it makes easy work of these crosswords. They run it on a few to prove how powerful it is, and then the community says, "Oh wow, that's cool, but please don't run it on any more of our advanced crosswords because they're very hard for us to come up with, and we really enjoy solving them by hand."

That's really what this compares to. I wouldn't call that gatekeeping; just respect. Respect for the game, respect for people's desire to have these hard problems to continue to work on, solving by hand.

If the company with the super advanced crossword solver then continues to use it and publish the results, they're effectively stealing the crosswords from this community. Soon, all the puzzles will be solved, leaving nothing left for the community to work on for fun.

That doesn't sound like gatekeeping to me. That just sounds like someone asking "Please be respectful and leave the remaining puzzles for us to solve by hand.” A simple plea not to be an asshole.

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We don't give mathematicians research positions to solve crosswords for fun. We want something back. We want theories and results that will advance our civilization.

We have people who want to fill those positions because there are enough people who find it rewarding enough. Take away reasons why they would find it rewarding and you will have fewer theories and results that will advance our civilisation.

And yes, fun counts. Nobody said this had to be only a hardship.

Money doesn't work that way though. There are plenty of jobs people would like to get paid to do, that doesn't mean someone needs to psy them to do it.

I'm well aware that if at some point AI is good enough to replace me as a software engineer then I won't have a job. I don't expect a company to continue to pay me simply because I enjoy it if there are cheaper options out there.

Math is no different.

As long as that company doesn't expect me to continue in their employment if I stop enjoying it, then we understand each other.

Total compensation includes fun.

Oh sure, you're well within your right to leave a job when you're sick of it. Nothing wring with that.

This is really the critical thing: the fun is the incentive. (Or at least the dominant incentive in math, historically.) As economists like to say, the overarching lesson in economics is that incentives matter. Reduce the incentives and participation will decrease.

Perhaps that won't matter if we enter an era where AI participants are the main participants who matter for discovery-level mathematics. But it would likely be what economists would see as a market failure if only a small oligopoly of AI participants, closely held behind closed doors, is able to fill that intellectual role.

I think you are missing the point of the main criticism. It is not about not wanting results in terms of proofs.

New theories and insights are typically created while working out proofs. If proofs now suddenly fall out of the sky (cause LLMs create them) then that work is not done which means the substrate on which new theories and questions and conjectures used to be grown disappears. It's in that sense that the math community (and thereby society as a whole) will lose something.

It's similar to how software engineering will need to find a solution to train their next generation. Current generations have all been through manual steps of designing things from scratch and writing them by hand. That's what allows your 10x engineers to understand whether what their LLM tools are doing is good and how to massage those tools to do the right thing. A junior engineer who has only ever used LLMs to write code and create architectures does not just not have that experience but also won't acquire it. You can't just say "we don't pay them to have fun and learn, we pay them to produce results". In the short term that is the case, but in the long term you as a company and we as a community will lose out.

I'm not saying don't use AI tooling. I'm saying that this is a hard problem which we yet to have to find solutions and approaches to. As a software community as well as as society in general.

"A junior engineer who has only ever used LLMs to write code and create architectures does not just not have that experience but also won't acquire it."

My ego tends to agree, that how can they be ever competent, if they have not endured the same hardships as I had crunching trough problems and getting allmost lost in the details.

But I rather suspect, they will turn out fine. I know LLMs are great for me to learn and I think the young generation will learn what they need to learn to get the job done.

How can they learn hard things if they have an infinite number of easy things to do? This is a middlebrow version of doomscrolling disease.

Most people have trouble not peeking at the answers. Look at Stack Exchange's long success.

Because keeping all the easy things coordinated and understanding the big picture is still a hard task yet unsolved by LLM's? But yeah, who knows what happens once that change. I assume even after the singularity, it still makes sense, that we train some people to know what is going on ..

How well do you think someone will understand fractions or trigonometry if they always punch their math homework into Wolfram alpha?

The increasing pervasiveness of technology in US education has not produced more capable graduates.

If a modern Gauss, Von Neumann, and Ramanujan appeared and started dropping proofs from the sky, would people be saying the same things? And if they could live forever, so they wouldn't need to train their replacements?

Who cares about them? I want Tao to stop proving all the interesting problems I was planning to work on.

Gauss and Euler, and also Ramanujan (results without proofs, which is a bit like unreadable Lean) did that for their lifetimes.

Yes, and they are revered as geniuses, which makes it clear that this is all sour grapes. And surely if people died, went to heaven, and were able to talk with God whenever they wanted, they wouldn't be upset that now they could know the answer to any mystery whenever they'd like; they'd appreciate that now they have someone to guide them! Or were they similarly upset when lecturers handed them already completed theory in school? There's already enough developed theory that people don't have the time to learn it all as it is.

Not exactly, because we would have cool people to inspire us and hang out with us.

But your argument is nonsensical because even if Gauss and von Neumann appeared, they wouldn't go into random fields and just prove things mechanically. They'd have to attend seminars, teach others, collaborate with others, and generally inspire others with their brilliance. It's the precise lack of this activity that makes AI in math so reprehensible.

Your argument encapsulates a contradiction because human mathematicians wouldn't be dropping proofs arbitrarily like AI is doing. They would do something completely different. Even the best of them.

Gauss was generally quite secretive and Ramanujan would famously tell people answers that he had received from divine inspiration, often with no ability to articulate how he knew. Von Neumann did just go into random fields and revolutionize them. If the three of them did come back from the dead and form a little powerhouse group that barely collaborated with the outside and just started publishing results for everyone else to try to keep up with, they'd no doubt still be considered geniuses.

Give it six months and models might be able to explain things better than any human. They can already collaborate perfectly well if you ask them to. e.g. there was a post here a couple months ago where Tao shared his ChatGPT logs[0].

If you're not inspired by the ability to talk to a superintelligent machine, and can't find what you'd want to know, that's a you problem.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010345

> Give it six months

Ah, the "six months till AGI" meme, but unironically :)

Also, before citing Terence Tao on LLMs maybe you should read what he has to say about it...

It's been doing all of the actual coding part of my job for the better part of a year, and you're commenting on a post about how it just released another round of math breakthroughs, besting a bunch of top humans. It can search the web and analyze documents it finds for me. It can do reverse engineering. It can analyze and create images.

Not sure what your definition of AGI is, but it clearly has superhuman performance on most knowledge work already. Do you think after already having demonstrated that it can solve top problems, that the final frontier it won't be able to cross is explaining its solutions to the experts that were researching those problems, and eventually to e.g. grad student or postdoc level practitioners as a lecture course/set of notes?

"Can do the coding part of my job" is your definition of "almost AGI"?

I don't know a single taxi driver who 5 years ago would have claimed "my car can now park itself, FSD must be barely 6 months away".

No, but when Waymos were able to do the driving part, they probably should've seen the writing on the wall.

> It's been doing all of the actual coding part of my job for the better part of a year,

Makes me think of the Upton Sinclair quote:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Not sure I follow: if it weren't incredibly useful, my salary wouldn't depend on it since it wouldn't be doing my work for me, innit? So if I am dependent on it, that's just agreeing that it's now replaced programming per se as a professional activity. That quote applies to the people selling the tool (not me), not the people who it will replace (me), and in the meantime who are buying/using it.

The only thing potentially stopping these models from also outputting new theories along the way is the goal they were given.

I have to assume OpenAI is only prompting to solve problems, presumably they could also prompt to not interesting new theories or paths of research found along the way as well.

OpenAI is doing problems because they know they can't do higher theory yet.

I asusme they're doing problems because its an easy way to turn $40m of someone else's money into a catchy news headline.

I think the crosswords framing is a little silly, but I have to wonder what comes when we use our technology to optimize the fun and interesting parts out of every job. There's only so many years of my life I can dedicate to back-and-forths with a chatbot. What if we advance our glorious civilization but our jobs just get more and more thoughtless and miserable?

I don't know about you, but my job has become a lot more fun ever since it's become a lot more back-and-forth with the robot. It does all the tedious things for me. It gathers data. It creates prototypes. It makes the mechanical code changes that I want. It allows me to talk with it for a design discussion, and then my design simply appears. I ask it for monitoring dashboards and they simply appear. It records what we talked about, which is something that I never do.

Largely I thought that this is what you do once you're established in math (or any field) anyway. You have some ideas, but the details are kind of too tedious for you to work out, so you give it to grad students/postdocs. Senior engineers have some ideas, but the details are tedious to work out, so you give them to junior engineers.

Now, obviously in the meantime, there's the question of how do we train the next generation? Or do we need to train the next generation? And maybe while we work that out the answer becomes more shadowing/apprenticeship instead of farming out easy tasks.

I think that's where people hope some kind if UBI or "universal high income" will save the day. Just don't think too hard about how it would actually be paid for, or how we can all have high income when that's a relative measure and we're all given the same amount of table scraps.

"universal high income" is not when everyone has high income, it's when everyone who doesn't have a high income is excluded from the universe. There will be few high income people, robots those people own, and the rest of us will be undesirables/illegals/felons/noncitizens of Ms-Apple-Meta-Tesla-Google-topia, who for arbitrary reasons XYZ (they didn't accept the EULA!) don't deserve universal high income (i.e. most people here will fall into that category).

What you're describing could well be how it ends up, but that isn't the future described by universal high income.

Yours is more likely in my opinion though, mainly because universal high income is completely infeasible and shaky even at the level of definition.

Then work part time, and enjoy your higher wealth to have fun in free time. Don't demand to have your cake and eat it too.

What higher wealth?

We're going to have a very different perspective on purpose going forward with these results. This has crossed a rubicon where human output itself is going to be completely outclassed by machines and we will have to find meaning elsewhere in life.

Then you don't understand the process at all. You will get something back, you will get an immense amount back. But (almost always) not directly. A mathematician will not suddenly solve a theorem that will enable a cure for cancer or better solar panels or whatever. But working in mathematics will build the gradual understanding that will enable those practical breakthroughs to take place. It's also the most important part of how the people that create those technical breakthroughs will be trained.

This is a really confusing take.

If someone can solve open problems in mathematics then they should do so, isn't it as simple as that?

They should let the public use the models as well, but I guess they have no real moral imperative to do so.

But asking them to stop solving problems is just weird.

If your only measure of advancing is getting an answer, but not building the capability to understand it, then civilization has advanced.

It’s not a human focused civilization, which is where the issue comes up.

As an example: A constant issue I am seeing with AI productivity is that the most productive use of AI is when it is paired with more experienced users, while AI also does more work for entry level workers, if not replacing them entirely. It has become a question where will the future buffer of experienced seniors come from.

This is an example of where simply chopping down trees for today, doesn’t make civilization better off tomorrow.

AI is producing more content than ever before, but our ability to understand and verify it is not keeping pace.

We don’t know if these are unsolvable problems at this stage. Society could come up with workarounds and solutions to these issues in several years.

The request to stop, is part of the process by which the issues are debated and solutions found. It doesn’t mean their position is weird or moot.

If someone gets the answer sooner than you, that doesn't inhibit you developing your understanding of the answer privately the same way you would have done if they hadn't got the answer. I don't see how anybody loses by the answer being discovered sooner.

Not true. If I know the answer to a puzzle, I don't spend the time doing the puzzle.

If there is a prize associated with doing a puzzle, and a machine does it, then what incentive is there to pursue it.

Again, if you are only concerned with the outcome, and you have a preferred answer that you want (in this case "just use AI to advance faster"), then any information that doesn't support that case is useless or misguided at worst.

I am not trying to dissuade you from your preference. I am flagging that there is a set of other factors that influence the behavior of others, how that behavior is critical to the creation of expertise and drive, and thus why others hold different positions.

If you're concerned with something other than the answer, then the fact that the answer is already known hasn't actually provided the thing you're concerned about, so you can still do the thing you are concerned about.

If another human was likely to get the answer before you would you also discourage them from doing it because they would rob you of the chance to do the thing you're concerned about?

This is an ethical and moral question being added here.

Would it be unethical to dissuade someone else from enjoying the benefits of the process you wish to enjoy ?

Would it be unethical to stop a machine from data mining all the possible questions you wish to explore/enjoy.

And on another level - I am concerned with a bit more than just the answer. I am concerned with what system is in place to ask more questions and get more answers.

There is nothing in this argument that says that we won’t find some other way to study the subject. Maybe people will become monks and do math as a hobby.

We may end up in a daemon filled world, like 40k, where any hope of understanding the tech around us is impossible. (More impossible that today)

If someone spends their entire career not solving the puzzle, did they really learn to understand how to solve it?

They may very well have learned plenty of things and solved or discovered other puzzles, but if the first puzzle is worth pursuing because the solution is actually useful it seems liked we're better off with the solution than a bunch of failed attempts.

That said, I do question the value of solving many of these types of math problems. I'm no mathematician so I'm assuming I'm wrong here, but on the surface many seem mostly theoretical puzzles with little or no practical use.

Yes? We haven’t solved many puzzles about reality, but even half proofs and conjectures create tools that other people use to make progress.

I’ve made this point elsewhere but the debate here is between two different philosophical positions. Results vs process.

If all you care about is the results then the process doesn’t matter.

If a person is starving or needs medicine, then a long discussion on process is inhumane. They need results.

If the conversation is about process though, then focusing on the results is missing the point.

I’d say the question for results oriented people is what are the benefits of the process and at what point does it make sense to optimize for results vs process.

My read on much of the discussion here is that the debate is whether we want AIs solving problems that career mathematicians may spend a lifetime on and still not solve.

When the topic is about careers the question really has to be about results. Even if the results are made by solving different problems discovered along the way towards their original problem, it still has to be about those results.

There is absolutely a question of whether burning these resources is useful when the only outcome is a solution to a potentially obscure math problem, but that is more a question of prompting and goals rather than the use of these tools themselves.

> There is absolutely a question of whether burning these resources is useful when the only outcome is a solution to a potentially obscure math problem, but that is more a question of prompting and goals rather than the use of these tools themselves.

Could you elaborate?

OpenAI is sharing results that seem to have been based only on prompting to solve math problems. The results could have simply been a limitation of the prompt and goals given, prompting for more broad results other than just the solution.

But isn't all of schooling literally learning solutions others solved before us?

We spend most of our young lives (many of us our entire lives) studying physics, math, etc. that others have solved. (e.g Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Calculus, etc.)

Biology consists, almost entirely, of studying solved problems in nature.

Aren't AI breakthroughs just more to study?

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117237320796901560

Terence Tao’s “don’t create the open problem strip miner”

That doesn't answer the question. Assume today is not the stopping point, and that we end up with super-intelligent theory building AIs. Better than any current-day human. And better at explaining, creating visualizations, etc. than any current day human.

Why is it a problem that the professor is now a robot, and that humans could spend arbitrarily long learning from it and even after 15 years of masters-style advanced graduate lecture courses still have deeper still levels of the topic that the AI could teach them?

And if they never do reach that level of ultra-competence, well, then we found the niche for humans to continue to exist within.

Well the one issue is that this isn’t how students end up learning.

The base completion rate of MOOCs is single digits %.

What is preventing these crossword solvers from not looking at the advanced crossword solutions?

Mathematicians and academics in their ivory towers are forgetting that everything is getting automated. They want to carve out fun problem solving niches that's fine but who's going to fund that? If they want to be funded by the society/civilization their argument can't be leave advanced fun problems for their hobby.

Here's a fun quote:

https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/09/10/open-letter-about-th...

>Participation in an event so closely associated with Anthropic and OpenAI could plausibly negatively impact the future reputations of participants.

Given how much power advisors etc have over students in academia, interpret it as you wish.

Its worth noting though that you are comparing a profession with a hobby.

People go to said crossword group to enjoy the process of solving the puzzles. It doesn't actually matter if they have been solved yet or not, case in point the NY Times puzzles are enjoyed by more than just the first to solve them.

Professional mathematicians are ultimately being paid to solve the problems for a (hopefully) practical reason. Its always excellent when a person enjoys the process of the work they are paid to do, but ultimately they are still paid to do the work. I really hope your argument isn't that we should collectively be funding mathematicians to solve problems simply doe the love of the game.

> Professional mathematicians are ultimately being paid to solve the problems for a (hopefully) practical reason.

They are paid for the same reasons the NEA pays artists: out of a sense of obligation to demonstrate elite culture. The track record of practicality of pure math after WWII is essentially 0.

While I don't disagree, I think any justification for why we should fund mathematics and why we should protect the work they are doing from being solved without them should be grounded in results.

Similarly I wouldn't expect a good argument could be made that AI tools should be prevented from creating art because we want to continue funding artists.

If the goal of said funding is just to let them spend their time doing it then it doesn't matter that AI is doing it as well.

This analogy is silly because (a) math is not primarily for entertainment, (b) we aren't going to run out of math proofs, and (c) results build on top of other results, having more results proven makes all math more powerful and useful.

Hmmm but in the case of math, while some of it is "just puzzles" there often turns out to be practical applications, even if they are not obvious at first. Number theory was considered the epitome of pure math with no practical applications for centuries, now our modern society is built on it (public key crypto).

Blah blah blah. They are free to do their own mathematics and/or spend time on polishing/reviewing proofs dumped by ai. But they don't get to make demands like don't test math on proprietary models. Idiots.

If the crosswords were purely games that would be no problem. These crosswords seem to power physics, chemistry, engineering and science applications. These professions would not mind it too much.

Math doesn't belong to academics. We don't pay them to work on problems for fun. They will just need to re-evaluate where the value their provide is. It won't be solving problems anymore. Hopefully it will be making them understandable by others at least till AI can't do that as well.

"They will just need to re-evaluate where the value their provide is."

That is fine to say when it is not your field. I guarantee you feel different when it is the thing you care about, that gives you joy, that defines your status. Think about how many sheldon-equivalents insist on being called Dr. (non medical)

It is part of what people use to define themselves. Its going to hurt. There may even be a Bulterian Jihad

Not our field? Most of us are programmers here.

It is clear to me that any competent person with a little patience can now build software better than what I used to build by hand.

> Think about how many sheldon-equivalents insist on being called Dr. (non medical)

Why do physicians insist on calling themselves Dr. (medical)?

No, you dislike maths to the point you prefer paying others to do it. Actual mathematicians are largely doing it for fun, but are now effectively saying "stop destroying our fun or we'll stop doing maths", and you will have to do the maths yourself.

Well, they do they?

Whole sections of the economy are being upheaved by AI, and there is no reason to make a special case for the mathematicians anymore than for the illustrators, developers, translators, HR, etc.

It isn't some law of nature. Humans/societies have agency - what AI should or should not be used is up for debate and decisions. It might even wind up the other way around that using AI is the special case - who knows.

> what AI should or should not be used is up for debate and decisions.

Of course; but it's very hypocritical to raise these feelings only when mathematicians are affected, whereas all the above professions are just told to adapt to the new way of things.

For sure though, translators don't have the same clout and social status as mathematicians do.

Oh right, how rude of me to only talk about mathematicians in this thread about the future prospects of children in Sudan. Of course this is the place to make "what about the illustrators" argument.

I actually really like math and I can't wait for the day LLMs not only solve difficult problems but can also explain the solutions to me.

Mathematicians do a terrible job here. They use inconsistent symbols they don't even explain. They often obfuscate the main idea just to make the paper longer. If you are not part of a small club you are not meant to understand it. I think this is a terrible approach and I am eagerly waiting for AI to do a better job!

But won't new humans take their place that will be the ones who enjoy deciphering AI solutions?

It just seems that this class of mathematicians is being "disrupted".

The field is changing and a new class of mathematicians will take their place.

This happens all the time in fields as technology disrupts them.

A new class of individuals, with different motivations, take the place of the old guard.

I'm sure the motivations of individuals involved in designing and manufacturing cars changed as Henry Ford introduced the factor line.

But that old crop of humans either adapted or retired.

But, plenty of humans took their place with new motivations and automotive technology continued to progress.

I personally feel math will indeed move faster as a result of these breakthroughs. And the humans that take the place of the old guard will have different passions and motivations than the current group.

Maybe the new group will be productivity motivated rather than motivated by the love of tinkering with a single problem for years.

> Maybe the new group will be productivity motivated rather than motivated by the love of tinkering with a single problem for years.

Sounds like salaries for mathematicians need to start going up if we stop paying them with fun.

Classic alignment problem.

Despite nobody at openAI thinking of themselves as an asshole; despite society urging openAI not to be an asshole; despite the fact that being an asshole is entirely unnecessary even to accomplish whatever objective they are setting out to accomplish; despite everyone at openAI loudly declaring: we are not assholes!

They are still assholes.

reddit comment

This is maybe the lowest-quality comment on a thread full of them. Do better.

It's done in jest but I think I am accurately pointing out the interesting parallels between what these companies say they are doing (aligning models) and what they are not doing (aligning themselves).

If you listen to them, and you don't have to listen very hard to hear it, basically everyone at these labs is telling us that this technology is extremely dangerous and should be slowed down or paused entirely. Yet, they, the only entities with the power to actually do anything about it, are not acting AT ALL as if that's the case. They are all barrelling forward as quickly as possible. RSI, THE number one risk according to these guys, is being adopted at breakneck pace up and down the stack, from designing silicon, to training, to inference.

It's ridiculous and insane and I believe can be accurately summed up as, they are being assholes, because if they are actually right about this we are all gonna die. At the very least, and far more likely, every fun creative expressive human thing that is machine legible will be replaced by a torrent of machine slop. It's not "benefiting humanity." These mathematicians are telling you it's not benefiting humanity. It sucks.

Alignment problem.

On the contrary, I found it a nice piece of rethoric to reflect on how misaligned incentives can overrule each individual's preferences in order to induce the group to take the opposite path.

There's no way to spin this that doesn't make it sound like assholes being gatekeepers.

Here's a fun quote:

https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/09/10/open-letter-about-th...

>Participation in an event so closely associated with Anthropic and OpenAI could plausibly negatively impact the future reputations of participants.

Given how much power advisors etc have over students in academia, interpret it as you wish.

I’m sorry; but if mathematicians are in it because puzzle club is fun, then they should go join the fucking puzzle club and stop impeding scientific progress.

Science isn’t some passive busywork thing where you tie your hands behind your back because it isn’t fair on others to solve all the neat problems - or at least it shouldn’t be.

If your idea of science is leather patches on tweed suits and the quiet ticking of a clock while you do crosswords, then this is an argument in favour of letting the AI do the work so you can focus on your sudoku book in your slippers.

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