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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

> job of professional mathematician might be the first to be completely eliminated by LLMs

Strong disagree.

Do you work in a math adjacent field? I do and I find having a mathematician around invaluable.

It's like a non-software person writing software. Yes, using a LLM will get you to a solution that works. But just talking with a software engineer will make the quality of that solution enormously better.

I find the same with math - I can get something to work using an LLM, but if I speak to a mathematician they'll say some magic words to try and I put that in the LLM and it is "oh yes this is a much better solution".

This is very different work to generating proofs though. Its things like "I'm trying to get my confidence intervals to properly deal with census like sampling but at small sample sizes" (yes, I know stats not pure math but still..)

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The main issue here is that people that are able to "Strong disagree" is shrinking with every model release, because it requires skills. So it will get more difficult to get funding.

You may say "hey, before AI people payed for math salaries even though they didnt understand the math or the economic outcome". But the issue is there are now "mathematitians" trying to convince not to fund.

In this new reality, you will get "mathematitians" trying to convince that only AI maths matter. And on the other side someone speaking about "understanding", "taste", "community". And the people deciding to fund dont have the skills to differentiate. So they will fund the AI boosters with a higher probability.

Thats how the job of professional mathematitian dissapears. By being replaced by something that on the surface looks similar, but its just an ugly copy.

Yes, I am projecting out into the future, not talking about the current state. I said "might be the first".

That's an uphill battle. People will hand wave that the s curve has flattened, and think it will stay at current levels. They claimed this confidently year after year over the last few years.

Other people have claimed confidently year after year over the last few years that the latest model was AGI - or that the singularity would arrive in a few months anyway. All the battles are uphill when you’re at a local miminum, I guess.

AGI has no goalpost-shifting-resistant definition anyway. In my estimation, the current tech is AGI by how I understood the term when it was introduced (at a time when AI as a label got adopted for things like image classifiers and machine translators and people needed a label for something that can work across tasks with a pure natural language interface telling it what to do). (And no, sentience, consciousness, inner experience, some amorphous "real understanding" etc was not part of the definition) We are in the scifi future just got used to it. Or haven't realized it yet because human systems have inertia and we could some oracle philosophers stone that knows the answer to every question in a nanosecond and we'd still lag 10 years in how to fit it into existing work flows and getting wet ink signatures onto paper authorizing it's use in the bureaucracy.

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