Imagine there's a very advanced crossword club where anybody can join and take a stab at these crosswords for the love of solving puzzles. Many of them are so difficult that no one's been able to solve them yet, but we know they're all solvable.
One day, someone comes along with a super advanced crossword solver application, and it makes easy work of these crosswords. They run it on a few to prove how powerful it is, and then the community says, "Oh wow, that's cool, but please don't run it on any more of our advanced crosswords because they're very hard for us to come up with, and we really enjoy solving them by hand."
That's really what this compares to. I wouldn't call that gatekeeping; just respect. Respect for the game, respect for people's desire to have these hard problems to continue to work on, solving by hand.
If the company with the super advanced crossword solver then continues to use it and publish the results, they're effectively stealing the crosswords from this community. Soon, all the puzzles will be solved, leaving nothing left for the community to work on for fun.
That doesn't sound like gatekeeping to me. That just sounds like someone asking "Please be respectful and leave the remaining puzzles for us to solve by hand.” A simple plea not to be an asshole.
And yes, fun counts. Nobody said this had to be only a hardship.
I'm well aware that if at some point AI is good enough to replace me as a software engineer then I won't have a job. I don't expect a company to continue to pay me simply because I enjoy it if there are cheaper options out there.
Math is no different.
Total compensation includes fun.
Perhaps that won't matter if we enter an era where AI participants are the main participants who matter for discovery-level mathematics. But it would likely be what economists would see as a market failure if only a small oligopoly of AI participants, closely held behind closed doors, is able to fill that intellectual role.
New theories and insights are typically created while working out proofs. If proofs now suddenly fall out of the sky (cause LLMs create them) then that work is not done which means the substrate on which new theories and questions and conjectures used to be grown disappears. It's in that sense that the math community (and thereby society as a whole) will lose something.
It's similar to how software engineering will need to find a solution to train their next generation. Current generations have all been through manual steps of designing things from scratch and writing them by hand. That's what allows your 10x engineers to understand whether what their LLM tools are doing is good and how to massage those tools to do the right thing. A junior engineer who has only ever used LLMs to write code and create architectures does not just not have that experience but also won't acquire it. You can't just say "we don't pay them to have fun and learn, we pay them to produce results". In the short term that is the case, but in the long term you as a company and we as a community will lose out.
I'm not saying don't use AI tooling. I'm saying that this is a hard problem which we yet to have to find solutions and approaches to. As a software community as well as as society in general.
My ego tends to agree, that how can they be ever competent, if they have not endured the same hardships as I had crunching trough problems and getting allmost lost in the details.
But I rather suspect, they will turn out fine. I know LLMs are great for me to learn and I think the young generation will learn what they need to learn to get the job done.
Most people have trouble not peeking at the answers. Look at Stack Exchange's long success.
The increasing pervasiveness of technology in US education has not produced more capable graduates.
But your argument is nonsensical because even if Gauss and von Neumann appeared, they wouldn't go into random fields and just prove things mechanically. They'd have to attend seminars, teach others, collaborate with others, and generally inspire others with their brilliance. It's the precise lack of this activity that makes AI in math so reprehensible.
Your argument encapsulates a contradiction because human mathematicians wouldn't be dropping proofs arbitrarily like AI is doing. They would do something completely different. Even the best of them.
Give it six months and models might be able to explain things better than any human. They can already collaborate perfectly well if you ask them to. e.g. there was a post here a couple months ago where Tao shared his ChatGPT logs[0].
If you're not inspired by the ability to talk to a superintelligent machine, and can't find what you'd want to know, that's a you problem.
Ah, the "six months till AGI" meme, but unironically :)
Also, before citing Terence Tao on LLMs maybe you should read what he has to say about it...
Not sure what your definition of AGI is, but it clearly has superhuman performance on most knowledge work already. Do you think after already having demonstrated that it can solve top problems, that the final frontier it won't be able to cross is explaining its solutions to the experts that were researching those problems, and eventually to e.g. grad student or postdoc level practitioners as a lecture course/set of notes?
I have to assume OpenAI is only prompting to solve problems, presumably they could also prompt to not interesting new theories or paths of research found along the way as well.
Largely I thought that this is what you do once you're established in math (or any field) anyway. You have some ideas, but the details are kind of too tedious for you to work out, so you give it to grad students/postdocs. Senior engineers have some ideas, but the details are tedious to work out, so you give them to junior engineers.
Now, obviously in the meantime, there's the question of how do we train the next generation? Or do we need to train the next generation? And maybe while we work that out the answer becomes more shadowing/apprenticeship instead of farming out easy tasks.
Yours is more likely in my opinion though, mainly because universal high income is completely infeasible and shaky even at the level of definition.
If someone can solve open problems in mathematics then they should do so, isn't it as simple as that?
They should let the public use the models as well, but I guess they have no real moral imperative to do so.
But asking them to stop solving problems is just weird.
It’s not a human focused civilization, which is where the issue comes up.
As an example: A constant issue I am seeing with AI productivity is that the most productive use of AI is when it is paired with more experienced users, while AI also does more work for entry level workers, if not replacing them entirely. It has become a question where will the future buffer of experienced seniors come from.
This is an example of where simply chopping down trees for today, doesn’t make civilization better off tomorrow.
AI is producing more content than ever before, but our ability to understand and verify it is not keeping pace.
We don’t know if these are unsolvable problems at this stage. Society could come up with workarounds and solutions to these issues in several years.
The request to stop, is part of the process by which the issues are debated and solutions found. It doesn’t mean their position is weird or moot.
If there is a prize associated with doing a puzzle, and a machine does it, then what incentive is there to pursue it.
Again, if you are only concerned with the outcome, and you have a preferred answer that you want (in this case "just use AI to advance faster"), then any information that doesn't support that case is useless or misguided at worst.
I am not trying to dissuade you from your preference. I am flagging that there is a set of other factors that influence the behavior of others, how that behavior is critical to the creation of expertise and drive, and thus why others hold different positions.
If another human was likely to get the answer before you would you also discourage them from doing it because they would rob you of the chance to do the thing you're concerned about?
Would it be unethical to dissuade someone else from enjoying the benefits of the process you wish to enjoy ?
Vs
Would it be unethical to stop a machine from data mining all the possible questions you wish to explore/enjoy.
And on another level - I am concerned with a bit more than just the answer. I am concerned with what system is in place to ask more questions and get more answers.
There is nothing in this argument that says that we won’t find some other way to study the subject. Maybe people will become monks and do math as a hobby.
We may end up in a daemon filled world, like 40k, where any hope of understanding the tech around us is impossible. (More impossible that today)
They may very well have learned plenty of things and solved or discovered other puzzles, but if the first puzzle is worth pursuing because the solution is actually useful it seems liked we're better off with the solution than a bunch of failed attempts.
That said, I do question the value of solving many of these types of math problems. I'm no mathematician so I'm assuming I'm wrong here, but on the surface many seem mostly theoretical puzzles with little or no practical use.
I’ve made this point elsewhere but the debate here is between two different philosophical positions. Results vs process.
If all you care about is the results then the process doesn’t matter.
If a person is starving or needs medicine, then a long discussion on process is inhumane. They need results.
If the conversation is about process though, then focusing on the results is missing the point.
I’d say the question for results oriented people is what are the benefits of the process and at what point does it make sense to optimize for results vs process.
When the topic is about careers the question really has to be about results. Even if the results are made by solving different problems discovered along the way towards their original problem, it still has to be about those results.
There is absolutely a question of whether burning these resources is useful when the only outcome is a solution to a potentially obscure math problem, but that is more a question of prompting and goals rather than the use of these tools themselves.
Could you elaborate?
We spend most of our young lives (many of us our entire lives) studying physics, math, etc. that others have solved. (e.g Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Calculus, etc.)
Biology consists, almost entirely, of studying solved problems in nature.
Aren't AI breakthroughs just more to study?
Terence Tao’s “don’t create the open problem strip miner”
Why is it a problem that the professor is now a robot, and that humans could spend arbitrarily long learning from it and even after 15 years of masters-style advanced graduate lecture courses still have deeper still levels of the topic that the AI could teach them?
And if they never do reach that level of ultra-competence, well, then we found the niche for humans to continue to exist within.
Mathematicians and academics in their ivory towers are forgetting that everything is getting automated. They want to carve out fun problem solving niches that's fine but who's going to fund that? If they want to be funded by the society/civilization their argument can't be leave advanced fun problems for their hobby.
https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/09/10/open-letter-about-th...
>Participation in an event so closely associated with Anthropic and OpenAI could plausibly negatively impact the future reputations of participants.
Given how much power advisors etc have over students in academia, interpret it as you wish.
People go to said crossword group to enjoy the process of solving the puzzles. It doesn't actually matter if they have been solved yet or not, case in point the NY Times puzzles are enjoyed by more than just the first to solve them.
Professional mathematicians are ultimately being paid to solve the problems for a (hopefully) practical reason. Its always excellent when a person enjoys the process of the work they are paid to do, but ultimately they are still paid to do the work. I really hope your argument isn't that we should collectively be funding mathematicians to solve problems simply doe the love of the game.
They are paid for the same reasons the NEA pays artists: out of a sense of obligation to demonstrate elite culture. The track record of practicality of pure math after WWII is essentially 0.
Similarly I wouldn't expect a good argument could be made that AI tools should be prevented from creating art because we want to continue funding artists.
If the goal of said funding is just to let them spend their time doing it then it doesn't matter that AI is doing it as well.
Despite nobody at openAI thinking of themselves as an asshole; despite society urging openAI not to be an asshole; despite the fact that being an asshole is entirely unnecessary even to accomplish whatever objective they are setting out to accomplish; despite everyone at openAI loudly declaring: we are not assholes!
They are still assholes.
If you listen to them, and you don't have to listen very hard to hear it, basically everyone at these labs is telling us that this technology is extremely dangerous and should be slowed down or paused entirely. Yet, they, the only entities with the power to actually do anything about it, are not acting AT ALL as if that's the case. They are all barrelling forward as quickly as possible. RSI, THE number one risk according to these guys, is being adopted at breakneck pace up and down the stack, from designing silicon, to training, to inference.
It's ridiculous and insane and I believe can be accurately summed up as, they are being assholes, because if they are actually right about this we are all gonna die. At the very least, and far more likely, every fun creative expressive human thing that is machine legible will be replaced by a torrent of machine slop. It's not "benefiting humanity." These mathematicians are telling you it's not benefiting humanity. It sucks.
Alignment problem.
That is fine to say when it is not your field. I guarantee you feel different when it is the thing you care about, that gives you joy, that defines your status. Think about how many sheldon-equivalents insist on being called Dr. (non medical)
It is part of what people use to define themselves. Its going to hurt. There may even be a Bulterian Jihad
It is clear to me that any competent person with a little patience can now build software better than what I used to build by hand.
Why do physicians insist on calling themselves Dr. (medical)?
Whole sections of the economy are being upheaved by AI, and there is no reason to make a special case for the mathematicians anymore than for the illustrators, developers, translators, HR, etc.
Of course; but it's very hypocritical to raise these feelings only when mathematicians are affected, whereas all the above professions are just told to adapt to the new way of things.
For sure though, translators don't have the same clout and social status as mathematicians do.
Mathematicians do a terrible job here. They use inconsistent symbols they don't even explain. They often obfuscate the main idea just to make the paper longer. If you are not part of a small club you are not meant to understand it. I think this is a terrible approach and I am eagerly waiting for AI to do a better job!
It just seems that this class of mathematicians is being "disrupted".
The field is changing and a new class of mathematicians will take their place.
This happens all the time in fields as technology disrupts them.
A new class of individuals, with different motivations, take the place of the old guard.
I'm sure the motivations of individuals involved in designing and manufacturing cars changed as Henry Ford introduced the factor line.
But that old crop of humans either adapted or retired.
But, plenty of humans took their place with new motivations and automotive technology continued to progress.
I personally feel math will indeed move faster as a result of these breakthroughs. And the humans that take the place of the old guard will have different passions and motivations than the current group.
Maybe the new group will be productivity motivated rather than motivated by the love of tinkering with a single problem for years.
Sounds like salaries for mathematicians need to start going up if we stop paying them with fun.
https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/09/10/open-letter-about-th...
>Participation in an event so closely associated with Anthropic and OpenAI could plausibly negatively impact the future reputations of participants.
Given how much power advisors etc have over students in academia, interpret it as you wish.
Science isn’t some passive busywork thing where you tie your hands behind your back because it isn’t fair on others to solve all the neat problems - or at least it shouldn’t be.
If your idea of science is leather patches on tweed suits and the quiet ticking of a clock while you do crosswords, then this is an argument in favour of letting the AI do the work so you can focus on your sudoku book in your slippers.
The picture I have in mind is OpenAI running their most advanced model in a loop over all the open mathematical problems they can find, just to verify that the model is indeed very smart. Neither the company nor the model actually care about the problems, it's just a cheap exercise machine for them, but the problems get solved and mathematicians don't even get to participate.
Like, even those who accepted the "centaur" thinking, man + machine, won't benefit because by the time they get their hands on good enough models, everything is already done.
It's an emotional thing first and foremost - people who care about the thing can't do the thing, because it's already been done by those who couldn't care less about it.
And before someone goes "poor mathematicians", a food for thought: this is just an early instance of what looks like our shared destiny.
I said here before: given the economics of progress in AI and robotics, it's obvious what the natural division of labor is: computers do the thinking, humans do the menial, manual labor. AI will do politics and philosophy, so you have more time to fold laundry and scrub the toilet.
Are we gonna get the same pushback from medical researchers if the models cure xyz diseases?
I absolutely understand the emotional connection to their work and the heartbreak, but mathematics doesn't exist for their pleasure, it exists to provide tools to solve humanitie's problems.
Some of it, yes. Much like physics. Both have a track record of producing technological breakthroughs every now and then, but it's not why people are doing it.
> Are we gonna get the same pushback from medical researchers if the models cure xyz diseases?
For better or worse, yes. We already are. In my country, there's a big spat between radiologists and cardiologists right now, that boils down to the progress of technology allowing the former to answer questions that, before, involved a procedure that was a big money-maker for the latter.
The general body of research points that more doctors lowers all cause mortality ( with diminishing returns) but Tunisia is still far lower than the Eu average.
Yet Doctors and med Student unions do lobby very heavily against expanding admission to the public uni or allowing private unis.
So we have the weird situation where people go and study in Romania ( making Tunisia lose hard currency that it really needs).
These doctors have taken an oath and the direct consequence of their lobbying is literally more deaths.
Obviously this is often coming from folks who act in same ways as they criticize and usually don't contribute even a fraction back to society compared to doctors. Folks who do mistakes in their lives all the time yet thats fine since we are all humans or similar, right.
So please stop this cheap framing and accusations. If Tunisia wants more doctors and keep them there are ways to do it, society as a whole needs to decide what they want and act upon it. Otherwise, smart skilled folks will keep going for better lives elsewhere, just like everybody else.
Everyone (near enough) has some degree of self-interest. If you apply for a job and discover that some other applicant is about as well fitted to it as you and in more need of money, do you withdraw? If you see a $20 note on the ground and no one else around who might have dropped it, do you refrain from picking it up if you think you're better-off than the median person who might walk past next? If you see something you want going for a very good price on eBay, do you contact the seller and say "I think you should be making me pay more for this"?
Unless you are an extremely unusual person, the answers to those questions are somewhere between "no" and "of course not, and why would you even ask?".
If someone is working as a doctor, their work is already benefiting others substantially more than the typical person's. (At least, I think it is; it's certainly doing so more directly.) Being a doctor doesn't put them under some unique obligation never to give any priority to their own interests when, e.g., choosing what job to take where.
If they can save 0.2 lives per day for $50k/year in one place and save 0.19 lives per day for $200k/year in another, it would be virtuous for them to do the former but I can't see that it's obligatory. In the case we're talking about, it might actually be 0.2 lives per day for $50k/year versus 0.21 lives per day for $200k/year, because somewhere that can afford to pay them more can probably also afford better equipment, more ambulances, etc. (In case it isn't obvious, all actual numbers here are made up and nothing I'm saying depends on exactly what they are, only on the rough relationships between them.)
It seems to me like any principle that would oblige them to pick the first of those options over the second would e.g. also oblige all of us who have well paid jobs to give most of what we earn to life-saving charities. Some people do that. It's a virtuous and commendable thing. It would doubtless be better if more people did. But, as you might have noticed, very very few people do that and by and large we don't consider it outrageous that they don't, and I don't see why doctors in particular should be condemned when they don't do it.
(Since clearly unassisted human nature isn't going to make everyone behave in such a way, it seems to me that if we wanted that sort of thing then it would need to be imposed by force. Which in fact everyone might be OK with, in the same sort of way as players of high-level sports are OK with having externally-imposed safety rules so that we don't get everyone playing in increasingly dangerous ways for the sake of a small advantage over people who are being more careful. And, in fact, we do have that sort of thing and it is imposed by force; it's called taxation, and actually I think it's a beautiful thing even though there's plenty to dislike about every actually-existing regime of taxes and benefits. This is mostly a digression, but note that it means that if a doctor chooses to go somewhere where they're paid better it probably also means that they're contributing more to the general welfare in taxes. There are plenty of nits one could pick with this remark, but it still seems worth making.)
Most doctors aren't running departments in major hospitals, or advising government on policy. They don't earn the big bucks. And even hospitals themselves tend to run in the red all the time; it's sometimes hard to disentangle where greed ends, and longer-term interests of patients begin, as you have multiple people and organizations pulling in different directions for different reasons.
RE private medical universities, N=1 but in Poland we have a private provider pushing hard for training their own doctors "because public system is too slow and limited", and it's hard to tell whether they have a point, or whether it's a private-driven attempt at privatizing national healthcare, or a mix of both.
The risk here is that this does do fundamental long-term damage to mathematics as a viable field.
Virtually no one is going to want to take on the risk of PhD-level math work, studying a narrow problem for four years or so to arrive at an impressive incremental result, when there's a sword of damocles hanging over their head every day that an internal system held by an oracle they don't have access to may scoop their results and turn those four years into dust.
To some extent, that sword of damocles always existed in a de minimus sense in the form of other mathematicians. But everyone was playing the same game, coming to the game with the same arsenal limited by human cognition.
If the game board becomes irrevocably tilted, new entrants have no incentive to play except as a hobby. But few hobbyists can devote years of work to understanding and pushing the frontier. It could well mean existential damage to mathematics as a field.
Whether that might undermine math's ability to solve humanity's problems in the long term is almost an economics problem, not unlike the question of whether and when the existence of monopolies ultimately restricts long-term economic growth. Much probably depends on whether intellectual monopolies or oligopolies are being created that will supplant the existing mathematics "economy".
All the commotion evens out: It's much easier to learn maths than ever before; you don't need to go to lectures any more; you don't need to learn from a specialist (advisor, lecturer) any more; it all costs much less than it used to.
So mathematics will continue to advance, albeit differently from before. The social structures will not survive however.
There's probably a loose and deeply imperfect analogy with computing: via democratization hobbyists have made a big impact in applied operating systems development (Linux/OpenBSD) but have been less successful/impactful in OS research (whither Hurd...) or in cost-heavy fields like microprocessor design.
Lol. As long as the process aka trials is respected not many would complain.
The feedback loop required to make progress is very different in medicine compared to math.
While AI has definitely helped quite a bit I am wondering how much all this research and treatments cost. Not sure the current health systems could sustain this for _everyone affected_. If ai enables it all the better.
My understanding of what Sid's describing is that you do RNA sequencing, a whole genome sequencing, feed that into frontier AI (if it will still let you), and somewhere along the way give the information the AI finds to people who can use it make a personalized mRNA vaccine, specifically for you and your cancer.
Another link here about Sid's case, it explains it didn't go through trials: "made possible through a compassionate use allowance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)".
https://www.houstonmethodist.org/newsroom/houston-methodist-...
I am not medical, so I'm happy for someone who understands better to come in and explain all the myriad ways I am wrong.
It's tempting to say "both", but that misses that AI is now forcing us to pick one.
As 'ogogmad said upthread:
> mathematics will continue to advance, albeit differently from before. The social structures will not survive however.
Who decreed that? Mathematics predates capitalism and publish-or-perish by a couple of millennia. Euclid’s Elements were not written to benefit the weapons or medical industry.
Maybe this hurts more than it should do because of publish-or-perish.
But humanity is not going to sit around and wait for solutions just so hobbyists can have a moment of glory.
Incredibly delusional and disconnected from the vast majority of people who are voters.
If only.
They certainly can't do them worse than humans.
In this instance however, it's openAI and Anthropic that are pushing people out of the field by running secret models that take the interesting work away and leaves the persons having to review endless slop proofs.