But from my perspective proofs have never been the most interesting part of maths. What really interests me is the intuition that leads to new applications, and to new questions. Newton, for example, gets more credit for calculus than Leibniz because he's the one who demonstrated how darned useful it is. Erdos is arguably more famous for asking interesting questions than for answering them.
I still don't see LLMs seriously contributing to that facet of mathematics any time soon. Every so often I ask one to suggest a good binomial confidence interval for a particular application, and it still tends to just suggest one of the subpar options that everyone learns in a first year stats course.
The recent barf-out done by LLM companies is useful if what are you are interested in is an unreadable mess and someone giving you the final answer. You might be able to extract some new "aha!" moments out of it, but we will have to wait and see what happens once people go through it. I would hypothesize the LLM output will be good at hinting at some non-obvious relationships and patterns, but I doubt it will yield anything of substance in its own right.
Historically, proving difficult theorems required mathematicians to sometimes invent new fields, new ways of looking at problems, the discovery of which itself yielded incalculable contributions to both mathematics and other fields. It is this that is the greater contribution of and to mathematics.
Mathematicians working at universities are paid to teach, to engage in the politics and business of government contracting, and only in very rare circumstances to play prestige games on famous problems.
It is unlikely that Congress will decide to slash budget for NSF's MPS directorate on account of AI getting good at proving theorems. That's just not how Congress works.
It is also unlikely that LLMs will be able to do, in the near future, do the sort of applied mathematics that happens in the context of occasional NIH or DoD funding that flows into Mathematics departments, for a variety of complex sociological reasons I'm happy to expound upon.
And it's unlikely Engineering degree programs will stop requiring calculus sequences, since being able to do the computation was has not been the actual point of teaching calc since he late 20th century (if ever).
So, the good news is that I doubt any of this will have much of an effect on the job market for Mathematicians who want to prove theorems for a living. The bad news, of course, is that the job market for Mathematicians who want to prove theorems for a living was already pretty horrendous.
I really need to just stay off social media for like a month and keep talking IRL. Longer, if I know what's good for me.
And this is only the beginning.
You are probably right that some companies are factoring AI into headcount but I'd imagine that the interest rate and energy crisis are bigger concerns
It was long predicted that the sign that AI is here in macroeconomics is rising interest rates, because investors can get MUCH higher rates of return doing AI investments than borrowing governments, why would I lend money to Greece when I can lend it to Anthropic?
LLMs haven’t done much in the way of informing me or others I know regarding “who and how many”.
I’ve worked in tech for 20+ years and I’ve never seen it like this. Sure there are job openings, but sooo many applicants it seems.
(This is Sweden, YMMV.)
But many people perceive this very differently, see link below. And perception is reality after all.
Jokes aside, its like working for a company, individually you can lift mountains and someone else will take credit. When you use LLMs for a single bit, all credit goes to LLMs lol
Is it like Chess and Go? There are still plenty of people playing for fun, but the machines are better at it than we are.
Now the thread has been cleaned up and a pro-defeatism comment is the top comment and the submission is on the front page again (I'm not alleging moderator intervention, user mechanisms are sufficient).
Sure, there are people who overstate things. But that isn't an excuse to keep your head in the sand.
Anticipating that something will happen is not the same as evidence that it's happened.
A lot of us knew what was coming. Profs I speak to these days say it's the same old except they need to pick a different kind of problem for grad students
Wow that's very well worded.
AI will not replace the mathematical community (peer review, abstraction creation) until AI can train the next AI purely on data generated by itself and with a tool in a turing complete environment. The environment has to be air-gapped from human data but the AI can use tools and its own outputs
I think that "solving math" is isomorphic to solving the "thinking part" of the scientific process which would be genuine RSI
> I think I have been underrating the pace of model improvements. In March 2025 I made a bet with Tamay Besiroglu, cofounder of RL environment company Mechanize, that AI tools would not be able to autonomously produce papers I judge to be at a level comparable to that of the best few papers published in 2025, at comparable cost to human experts, by 2030. I gave him 3:1 odds at the time; I now expect to lose this bet.
https://www.daniellitt.com/blog/2026/2/20/mathematics-in-the...
“I’ve slowly updated my timelines over the past year…”
and
“I think I have been underrating the pace of model improvements. … I was not correctly calibrated as to the capabilities of existing models, let alone near-future models.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II
the above, a "sorting" machine is the primary usage of hyperscalers currently, they're just trying to find new uses to boot for extra money/legitimation.
the browser industry the phone industry the CAs JavaScript
it's all paid for by those wanting to sort humanity into whatever bucket the can fear monger the peasantry into for aweek or however long it takes the classification system to sort out.
gentrification works, but we chose forcible displacement now we have to live with the forever consequences.
would you give guns and bombs to the displaced native americans who taste blood over their beads and trinkets?
we've been inside the event horizon of the singularity for years, the tax bill will only get worse unless we recognize it for the tick that it is.
Yes, outsiders (investors, journalists) are given a false impression while insiders (software engineers) are supposed to give up. Double win for the agitprop machine.
How will it pan out, no one really knows. The leading frontier labs are continuing to hire aggressively. But who knows for how long or for long or near-term goals.
There were mistakes that could easily be seen with a diagram rendering three big results wrong, exposition is terrible, no coherent underlying theory generated from solving so many problems, as Thomas Bloom pointed out even duplicate proofs of the same statement in a single paper.
It clicked for me, "this is slop but slop can be superhuman and useful!". Similar to programming where it can generate as many criticisms of your codebase but you have to weed them out.
I was taking to my friend in OA who was really surprised that the proof of L(F_2) = L(F_3) could be done in the 1980s. We just didn't have a superhuman deducer back then.
Special relativity which Einstein got a Nobel for is now taught in high-school.
"Of course if you move a magnet in a piece of copper you will generate a current, it's extremely obvious it should be so"
Sometimes you think you’ve been accused of everything you could be accused of. Wonders never cease!
> The "moderation by less", as well as the guidelines, are both farcical in nature. They've given way to ruination of an otherwise decent tech discussion forum
The guidelines have been constant (with minor updates) for most of the two decades HN has existed. Dan’s a moderator for 14 years and I’ve been one for several. Both of us have been active participants almost since the beginning. When did the ruination begin?
Your comment seems a generic vent, largely unrelated to the parent comment but if you have any actionable suggestions you’re welcome to email us.
There it is, the "off topic" play. Well done, Tom.
If you'd put anywhere near the amount of attention in moderating the site for over all quality that you put into my "largely unrelated" comment, this entire comment thread would not exist. Think it over.
That neither of you are at the very least bothering to steer the greater discourse towards some higher ground is a lack of balance that I am highlighting.
To remark my comment as off topic in the context of the thread opener is to dismiss what I am saying using a very lazy tactic that I've seen used countless times before. No, it is not off topic. It is very much on topic and relevant.
And if you have a problem with my comment, feel free to email me.
But one of your central complaints was about the guidelines, which have been constant for nearly two decades, so we’re just not having a serious conversation here. We’re always looking for signs that indicate if and how we can be doing better, but this interaction has nothing to grab onto.
Never been invited, but I've also never felt smart enough for that community. I'm glad I can read it though!