lemma1729

I think in short term, it will get better, as more funding flows from industry to academia, you will see a spur in well-compensated PhD positions. However, in the long run, while I doubt that mathematicians will go extinct, they might have to move on to industries like in trading, chip-making, where they oversee AI models write code and also proof that the code works and is consistent with other parts of the software. However, until we have infrastructure for human-AI math research, as Tao himself said that the "roads" for human-AI research is yet to be built, humans would simply be working FOR AI models, and not working WITH AI, which will truly scale discoveries at a massive scale.

I am a number theorist and a graduate math student at Bonn. It is eery to see that all of a sudden everyone cares about pure math. Anyhow, I think such incidents like this one are only to happen more often in the coming days, and while many mathematicians are concerned about their role in the community; I believe since we are still very early stages of AI-driven discovery, we still need the appropriate infrastructure for human-AI research, such as with versioning for proofs, a bigger library than mathlib and a central reasoning space so traces aren't lost- which happens to be the most valuable training data for models, and without which, these discoveries do not help much at advancing the field, and remain as blackbox.