There’s a somewhat famous lecture [0] by Wigner (one of the greats of 20th century physics if you’re not familiar) on exactly this topic. One of his points is that new tools and ways of thinking developed on the way to solving mathematical problems with no apparent application often find downstream applications in science and engineering. If we’re skipping the part where we identify and understand the new math, will we still reap the unreasonable effectiveness? Tao’s position in this post suggests that the current wave of LLM successes is not conducive to this dynamic
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...