It's a grand experiment isn't it? Us senior programmers are pretty good at using AI (or so we think) because we have decades of grinding and problem solving to inform our intuitions. Is that really necessary? The next generation of programmers certainly will not have that level of desk-head interface. Maybe they'll be fine? Maybe the models will get so good it won't matter? Open question.
I imagine the same will be true of AI, but I'll say that in the short term AI is going to make mathematicians better because it solves the breadth problem. Again, I feel like this Barnette conjecture got solved (if it is solved) because of some clever partition function sums which are intellectually tractable but simply too far out of anything I'd seen before (I see the apparition of my GT combinatorics professor intoning gravely that "everyone knows that, Jake, you're an idiot"). Maybe AI will help identify common threads far greater than Google and journal search.
I think if I had ChatGPT when I was 20 and working on this problem for the first time I might not have solved it, but I would have learned every angle and facet of it far more quickly. But then again I would not have spent so many late nights staring at the Országház across the Danube and letting my mind drift and bump against the problem like spilled cargo in the river.
I imagine the same will be true of AI, but I'll say that in the short term AI is going to make mathematicians better because it solves the breadth problem. Again, I feel like this Barnette conjecture got solved (if it is solved) because of some clever partition function sums which are intellectually tractable but simply too far out of anything I'd seen before (I see the apparition of my GT combinatorics professor intoning gravely that "everyone knows that, Jake, you're an idiot"). Maybe AI will help identify common threads far greater than Google and journal search.
I think if I had ChatGPT when I was 20 and working on this problem for the first time I might not have solved it, but I would have learned every angle and facet of it far more quickly. But then again I would not have spent so many late nights staring at the Országház across the Danube and letting my mind drift and bump against the problem like spilled cargo in the river.