the goalposts are on Pluto at this point.
replyI'd put good money on the fact that we will have a lot of distilled intelligence and yet the world won't look much different.
replyi mean that is already true
replyI'm not moving the goalposts. I haven't heard anyone, ever, refer to the Navier-Stokes problem as a top 3 problem in mathematics. People were saying that they thought the solution was in reach a few years ago, before AI was at all capable of research-level mathematics (and the expectation that there was a counterexample).
replyI am not particularly skeptical of claims about AI, compared to the average here on HN, but that doesn't mean every random piece of hype is warranted. What they did is impressive, even though we now know the only reason they threw so much compute at the problem is that they heard a rumor that someone else was already close. Navier-Stokes is not a top 3 problem in mathematics, and it was the one that was thought closest to being solved.
There were also some people talking about the Hodge conjecture, because it has some similarities to some LLM-assisted breakthroughs that were considered impressive in the distant past of [checks notes] July 2026. See, e.g., https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2026/07/20/human-mathemati...
replyI brought this up here at HN, and in the ensuing discussion Buzzard himself replied saying he was somewhat joking (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49011950).
replyCertainly, but the key word there is "somewhat". Progress is now happening so incredibly fast that I no longer know what to consider implausible.
reply