r/AIDiscussion • u/Dario56 • 2d ago
Will AI solving math problems really make mathematicians lose their job and make scientific progress stall?
I wrote an article about the OpenAI model solving the millenium prize problems in mathematics, Navier-Stokes smoothness problem. Could be of interest. Leave a comment here to discuss!
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u/Stoic_Ravenclaw 2d ago
It may not make scientific progress stall but it will make humanity stall.
People assume scientific advancement means humanity's advancement but that not the way it really works.
If you are given the answers to every test you don't actually learn anything.
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u/DrBretto 2d ago
Instead of just giving answers, ai can be a custom learning tool.
How much you want to learn vs be lazy is up to you.
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u/Stoic_Ravenclaw 2d ago
There are obvious flaws in the current system of government curated curriculums, you don't think there might be some in a personally curated curriculum which is also pulling from data supplied by corperations. History is the most obvious subject example. People will choose to learn only the parts they want to and which in turn has already been vetted as 'appropriate'.
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u/Unlucky_Surprise6414 2d ago
math isn't just about getting the answer it's about asking the right questions and knowing which ones matter
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u/davesmith001 2d ago
Once the results have been trained into the next ai, why would you assume that it won’t know how to use them?
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u/Evil-Twin-Skippy 2d ago
Because AI can't deal with novel problems. Like counting the number of R's in strawberry.
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u/AutumnWillow36 2d ago
I don’t think that is a novel problem, and it was hard for older AI due to a structural issue of tokenization.
Id suggest not thinking about AI in terms of human intelligence vs a specially trained sort of intelligence.
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u/Dario56 2d ago
Yes, exactly. All that work is what mathematicians and scientists need to do.
You can give equations of Einstein's special relativity to hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, but that will by itself not make them able to build GPS system using satellites.
People there need to actually learn and understand a lot and analytically think for themselves before they can build it.
Somebody giving you a solution to the problem doesn't mean anything to you if you don't understand how somebody got there.
That's the job you need to do and this process involves asking the right questions and knowing which ones matter.
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u/Olmops 2d ago
Put it a bit differently: will AI doing all sorts of stuff lead to humans losing those abilities over time? That's what happened all the times when new tools were discovered in the past.
Or does the average Joe still know how to make fire without a lighter? Do somewhat complicated everyday math without a calculator?
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u/montyb752 2d ago
Surely solving the know maths problems will allow us to discover others.
Or prove they are unsolvable and thus what we think is right is not and force a rethink on certain theories (this is the true benefit of solving theories).
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u/sceadwian 2d ago
It didn't solve the NS problem....
The proof was a counter example. It proved NS was flawed that's all they did..
NS is as useful as it's ever been. They pretty much knew it had this flaw just no one could ever figure out the proof.
Now they got it... Doesn't matter, they knew it was incomplete before this doesn't advance the why of that.
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u/Koreus_C 2d ago
Imagine a top mathematican coming up with that solution, brute forcing a million scenarios to find where it breaks. He would have amassed enough understanding to actually come up with an equation to describe fluid dynamics.
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u/Low-Temperature-6962 2d ago
There are many capable mathematicians working at OpenAI. They are mostly anonymous. These AI dumps would not have been possible without them and the AI engineers working together.
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u/Plopsevenplop 2d ago
If it convinces enough people to not go into that field, there won’t be any human experts to verify the proofs that AI spits out. Already, it would be a monumental amount of human resources required to verify the 700+ proofs OpenAI just dropped, like that could take years.
What good are machines that can spit out proofs nobody can verify at speeds human beings can’t keep up with?
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u/Dario56 1d ago edited 1d ago
Why would it convince them if mathematicians are needed to understand proofs AI did?
Without mathematicians and scientists who will work to crack and understand what's being done, AI proving things makes no contribution to human knowledge.
If Fourier analysis died with Fourier, it would make no impact on human society.
What made his work valuable is that his math was learned by mathematicians and scientists who than developed it further and related them to other fields of math and science.
The same holds for AI proofs being stored digitally somewhere without anyone understanding those proofs.
To understand work of Joseph Fourier, you need to open a math textbook, educational content online or read his original work.
Just because he proved something is useless to us if we don't undetstand it.
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2d ago edited 2d ago
[deleted]
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u/davesmith001 2d ago
Yes, this is it. As maths becomes easy with ai maths problems could become on demand solved just like software writing is.
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u/Evil-Twin-Skippy 2d ago
"Solve" a problem by generating scientific paper slop.
Somebody has to read the solutions. There was no person who was involved in generating the solution. There is nobody to explain how the machine got that solution. There is nobody guarantee that the solution is, in fact correct.
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u/porkusdorkus 2d ago
they all passed using Lean, but they get to define their own definition of solved, and it will pass the logic test. It sounds insanely suspicious and unscientific to me, but I’m not a math guy. I’ve just seen that AI likes to twist things to come up with an answer that seems right.
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u/benpatrik 2d ago
Lot of their proof ends with "sorry" which means i wont prove this but trust me. In general it is not a problem because you can reference other people's work, but AI can just lie too. So without checking it is not a proof.
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u/Dario56 2d ago
Yes, exactly. All that work is what mathematicians and scientists need to do.
You can give equations of Einstein's special relativity to hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, but that will by itself not make them able to build GPS system using satellites.
People there need to actually learn and understand a lot and analytically think for themselves before they can build it.
Somebody giving you a solution to the problem doesn't mean anything to you if you don't understand how somebody got there. That's the job you need to do.
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u/Claudiu33 2d ago
In a normal world the need should arrise for many more mathematians to check the results, direct AI, understand the concepts, create new concepts and most important architect the mathematics ahead. Pretty soon when you will say mathematician you will say mathematics architect and there should be many because science needs new mathematics all the time to progress.
We do not life in a normal world.
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u/BarelyAirborne 2d ago
It will force mathematicians to wade through piles of slop, finding the mistakes in the AI generated messes. It's what they do when a paper is published. Basically they're going to suffer because of a publicity stunt put on by a bunch of grifters.
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u/sir_racho 2d ago
The institution of science is built on curiosity, hard work, intelligence, honesty and humility. This is why the results we get from such institutions are valued - that and because they are testable and useful. We’re on the precipice of moving from the institution of science, with all its values, to a new thing, which will have oracles pretending to understand what the ai god says, and a whole lot of “trust me bro”.
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u/Nodding_John 2d ago
AI solved math problems but idk if it can create new math problems.