Simons Foundation launches $15M effort to help mathematicians navigate AI era (simonsfoundation.org)

If it doesn’t pay for non-permanent staff salary that would be sad for the maths ppl indeed.

OTOH I have a phd in th physics, 15+ y of academic senior researcher experience, now working 60+ h /w on an unpaid internship and using lunch money to pay for tokens.

And I’m by far not most unlucky

Edit: just to put things in perspective, my phd field (string theory) has 15-30M€ annual funding in Europe (per google)

Mathematicians are in the same boat as Silicon Valley programmers in the end: AI is doing their job better than them and cheaper. Other professions will join shortly.

The question then becomes, what do humans do? Resigning to die quietly is hardly the most favorable option?

Just because somebody else can do something better than you ever could doesn't make doing it superfluous. There is more to mathematics and software engineering than finding proofs and algorithms.

Much the same way that VC money has been funnelled to Google and Meta through advertising budgets.

But that doesn't sound like a good argument to ride off into the sunset, right? You probably enjoy living and it does make a difference in the lives of some close friends and relatives?

We don't organize societies around ruthless efficiency optimization, we organize them to be at least somewhat hospitable to humans and human enterprise.

Yet this has zero utility (other than your own satisfaction). Once you understand something, you will likely not even do a better job at explaining it to someone else, so the utility is strictly limited to yourself.

So even ignoring ability to understand the problem is the cost/efficiency of understanding (and applying it).

I agree with your other statements, but I feel you're suggesting the non-sense is scoped to just math. It's not it's almost everything that we do (exceptions are social interactions including care taking, etc.)

So in this frame your "nonsense" is (almost) everything that we do. Personally I'd like to keep doing things.

Let's say GPT-23 Astra grinds away for a full month one day and out pops a warp drive. Our best physicists ask it to explain. The resulting stream of text is essentially incomprehensible. But, they build a scale model at its direction to test and sure enough it does the Kessel run in 12 parsecs.

Are you saying we shouldn't hop aboard the USS Enterprise and check out Alpha Centauri because we don't understand the math?

I think what's really happening here is that there's an ivory-tower academic class that feels entitled to make their living at public expense thinking about and writing about their topic of interest, and along comes a new tool that's changing that dynamic up. Meanwhile, in the real world, the value remains with people who can take whatever the tool of the day is and do useful things with it. Which, I think, is why despite all the talk the only professional job losses blamed on AI appear to largely be companies that had a failed strategy of some sort or another and used AI as a boogeyman to do the layoff that they needed to do anyway. To people living in the private sector this isn't seen as a dangerous invader, LLM's are productivity multipliers.

* Lots of people use math for calculations without having proven any theorems.

* You can understand a mathematical statement without understanding or even having a proof. There are proofs built on the axiom of choice and conjectured results.

Math proofs are right in the sweet spot for training LLMs with RLVR. It isn't some general "LLMs are getting insanely smart!". Even most software development itself is miles away from being as well suited to training as math proofs are.

The majority of math research is akin to professional chess. Completely useless and the folks doing it are using their giant brains to play a game that no one outside themselves benefits from.

Second, the whole point of arXiv is open access. It didn't use to be this way. Research being disseminated as widely as possible is a good thing.

It is my understand that there isnt a lot of innovation here. Rather the (broad) field of mathematics got mined for solutions that already existed within the corpus.

It implies "We didn't know we already knew how to solve these problems". How is that a good look for mathematics as a field?

This applies to all fields and pursuits where AI is effective. Yes I think about this with regards to various things I’m working on.

This is just the nature of things, you need to adapt and not throw a tantrum like a child. You need to not behave like Terrance Tao who is essentially like a child in an adult’s body in terms of his behavior and lack of wisdom, and keep in mind he was a child prodigy so this isn’t a knock at all or statement about his intelligence, only his development as a man.

You can mourn, as I have for the field of programming as I knew it which I have loved since I was a child, but you need to move on.

Best I can tell the biggest complaints are really just that the future of their career is largely combing through lean and they don’t want to do that. Too bad. Adapt or get off the pot.

Mathematicians need to completely rethink the prestige paradigm. Counting proofs no longer works. That doesn’t mean there’s nowhere for them to go. Now it’s about gleaning human understanding from the lean. Maybe in the future LLMs can do that too and it’ll be all about formulating new conjectures.

In a sense, yes. There is no Simons Foundation for laid-off programmers. Taxi drivers and truckers, meanwhile, are really just trying to block change.

> wouldn't that make them the group that needs support the least?

I don't know. From a practical perspective, I am more confident the world will need mathematicians in 50 years than that it will need coders.

Not in the same extinction-class event way. In large part because hiring developers is still profitable.

Also, not remotely as well organized or proactive as mathematicians anpparently are. So maybe less vanguard than the cannon fodder at the front.

…yes. That’s why the human mathematicians are having this debate. How to keep the human mathematicians and their founders motivated to keep doing math, potentially more productively with these new tools.

We don’t know this! We might just have no more American mathematicians because folks who aren’t mathematicians don’t understand that we’re turning mathematical breakthroughs from just a couple decades ago into real, working technology.

> It's not even clear if the human race can survive until then

It’s pretty obviously clear the human race can survive for hundreds more years…

"Climate change is going to kill everyone in 50 years so we'd better work fast if we want to burn all this coal by then"

You're gonna get downvoted but this is absolutely true. People who've never been in real professional academia don't understand but this is exactly what most very successful academics are like.

> When you remove this greed and status seeking you might actually end up with a healthy environment.

Nah I think you're just gonna have collapse because you've removed all incentive.

I don’t necessarily disagree but it seems like the AI companies are just as status seeking and infinitely greedier.

It may be true in some cases but as a blanket condemnation of the entire field it makes no sense. Moreover, I can't fathom how you could reach this conclusion if you've actually done any reading on "the whole situation." The reality is precisely the opposite of what you're claiming.

Mathematicians are upset partly because AI companies are "scooping" their work. If you had worked on something for years and this happened, you'd be upset, too. The manner in which this happened with Navier-Stokes was unconscionable. The mathematicians who did the work deserve recognition. OpenAI deliberately stole it from them.

More importantly, the purpose of mathematics isn't to produce proofs. It's to produce mathematics and mathematicians. Working through problems helps people find new mathematics -- and makes people mathematicians. A machine that generates proofs destroys that. It breaks the cycle that makes mathematics fruitful, interesting, and not just self-regenerative but self-propagating.

AI companies aren't just clear-cutting the fields of math; they're sowing them with salt -- and they're doing this precisely because of greed and hunger for status and the title of "first."

Perhaps to some maths is about progress, like other sciences, rather than self-portrayal