There's a long collection of comments by mathematicians at [1].
A large number of workers in the field are rather discouraged. The main quality complaint is that the proofs are ugly, long, and incomprehensible. One mathematician comments that the first proofs of new major results are often like that. Elegance comes later.
The main social complaint is that the social foundations of mathematics just changed, in a big way. The main practical complaint is "what do I do now", especially from PhD students who just lost their thesis topic. They sound like the Uber drivers fighting Waymo.
One comment was "A common piece of wisdom is that mathematicians only have a few tricks in their bag – which they skillfully apply again and again."
Feynman made that point in his autobiography. For various reasons, he had
a different set of mathematical tools than others in his field, and that helped
him to solve problems that stumped others.
A big AI model has access to all known tools. AIs have more breadth than any human.
Some of these breakthrough proofs seem to come from applying techniques
from areas different from what people in the field tend to use. I'm not qualified to comment on math at that level, but the comments by mathematicians seem to hint in that direction.
That may indicate why throwing vast amounts of compute at these problems works - an AI can try everything.
One comment was "A common piece of wisdom is that mathematicians only have a few tricks in their bag – which they skillfully apply again and again." Feynman made that point in his autobiography. For various reasons, he had a different set of mathematical tools than others in his field, and that helped him to solve problems that stumped others.
A big AI model has access to all known tools. AIs have more breadth than any human. Some of these breakthrough proofs seem to come from applying techniques from areas different from what people in the field tend to use. I'm not qualified to comment on math at that level, but the comments by mathematicians seem to hint in that direction. That may indicate why throwing vast amounts of compute at these problems works - an AI can try everything.
[1] https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/08/100-reactions-to-100...