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Comment by Maro

Exactly. Every mathematician is "robbed" from knowing 1-2 things that they would specifically work on, for any given topic, 99.99% of mathematicians are not robbed, and for any given mathematician, for 99.99% of topics they are not robbed of anything. That's my feeling..

Maybe post-LLMs mathematicians will work on problems/topics that even ChatGPT can't solve? Like, P=NP remains unsolved, we can work on that. Sure, it's possible that it will get solved tomorrow by an AI or somebody else, but that possibility was always there.. Or, to be more practical, one of the claimed OpenAI results is that integer multiplication is sub n×log(n), so assuming it stands, now there's a new question: "What is the actual lower bound for integer multiplication?"

I have no proof, but I believe (i) LLM progress will converge at some point, (ii) that point will not be so far off from human intelligence, since they're trained on human intelligence, so.. not all problems will be solved/solvable by LLMs. But they'll be fast(er), like calculators are faster than us.

parent Maro 13 days ago

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