When I'm thinking about AI in mathematics I end up thinking about the moon landings. It's not a perfect analogy. But there are some parallels. We tend to look back at them as a somewhat collective achievement of humanity; we're right to, I think. But the concentration of wealth in one place due to an arms race is what got us over the line. LLMs don't just stand on the shoulders of human mathematicians, they sort of *are* a distillation of everything we've written. And right now the AI industry is in a massive PR war.
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I think it's at least plausible that this period ends rather quickly, as the moon landings did. I wonder how many articles were written in 1969 about how we'd all be travelling to the moon one day. Another parallel is: what is the inherent value of putting someone on the moon? I think it's quite similar to a landmark theorem. It broadens our horizons, maybe even enables further research, but it doesn't have much to do with the price of fish. #ai #math #llm #science
