A non-zero amount of it is probably going directly to the AI companies through tokens...
Much the same way that VC money has been funnelled to Google and Meta through advertising budgets.
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.
Cheaper than them? That's dramatically unproven and unlikely just on power efficiency alone, even if we accept the suspect assumption the only efficiency anyone should care about is currency marked per line of code or theorem proved.
We're not just going to have to become better existential philosophers, we're going to have to become better examiners of assumptions and claims.
Pretty sure it was Tao but I could be wrong. In any case it now seems more defensible than it did when the idea was first broached.
Why? I thought we already established* that most professional mathematicians are not necessary (in the near future, then maybe "any"), so why would they doom these students with pity grants to basically create unnecessary jobs for them? More practically, wouldn't that money be best served (i.e., raw ROI) by purchasing more tokens on the frontier models?
(*) The existence of this effort itself is a good heuristic.
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.
Various historians agree with the idea credentialism is largely just a tool of aristocracy to manipulate the public.
Even if you want to work in research, AI offers a lot of opportunities to do even more research, and less grunt work
I hope the future you built for others is imposed on you too.
I haven't escape note that I can do tons of things with AI because I spent the last 10 years building a bunch of side projects and now I can complete those side projects because I know all the magic words.
Gonna need to unionize because the gerontology is just getting stronger.
It's also not an OpenAI, Anthropic or any specific name caused problem. This type of progress has always been happening, it's more or less coincidental (like Stigler's law). The problem though is we need to rethink how we operate as a society and too few (IMO) are trying to make this conversation happen.
It doesn't help you that AI understands it, when you don't. You are the one getting screwed over by others who understand statistics better than you do.
When you're rich enough, you can pay others (or AI) to protect you. But then you're dependent upon them.
So, under a transactional model of social relationships, you are in an arms race over raw intelligence and competency/data. With only one winner, who takes all in the end.
Logically, most people have already lost in that game, so why keep playing that nonsense?
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.
In the real world, the frontier labs are still hiring lots of humans for business and software roles (https://openai.com/careers/search/) despite being better positioned than anyone to automate them away with their world-beating models and save a bunch of salaries.
For automated AI shilling ...
* 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.
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.
John von Neumann
No one wants a data center in their back yard, but in the private sector I think adoption isn't as political as some make it on Hacker News.
There's no particular reason to believe that solving math theorems generalizes to engineering or robotics without a whole lot of additional work.
Never understood this sentiment. Theses top researchers could do almost anything else with their skills outside Academia and make far far more money. You don't get rich off grants... They could all presumably walk into Anthropic or OpenAI for near $1M a year in TC.
If you yourself are as cracked as you think you could also do the same...
Essentially gifts for the annointed.
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.
Mathematicians also decide what to prove in their research - taste is not a skill we have RLVR'd away (yet, not claiming this is fundamental).
Of course, the field is being fundamentally transformed, it will probably end up looking more like experimental science in the future.
As a software engineer, my mental model so far is that OpenAI made a gigantic (but potentially sound) pull request to the math community, and the mathematicians just did not have enough bandwidth to review and merge it.
If my model is correct, I guess it makes a lot of sense to fund mathematicians, because their lack of resource is the bottleneck here.
All I'm saying is the math advances of late really hasn't changed much outside of math as far as AI is concerned.
Robotics is likely to follow a similar trajectory. You can say that robotics is not clinical like mathematics is, yet it kind of is, you can create simulated training environments of any complexity.