Robert Bjarnason

As a former math professor and still sometime math researcher, I am rather disappointed in the reaction of the "official math community" to LLMs doing math epically well... The official hierarchy of award-winning mathematicians and prize committees do not f**king own mathematics, and nobody should have to get permission to prove f**king math theorems !!! Come on people !! What would piss me off would be if rich companies were proving important, useful math and keeping it secret and not sharing it with the world (which after all supplied their models with all that critical data on the historical math already created etc.) -- but this is NOT what is happening, at least not so far at least... LLMs are currently superhuman mathematicians in some respects, yet inferior to strong human mathematicians in other respects. Whether creative mathematical conjecturing turns out to be AGI-hard is not 100% clear, but I suspect that in some respects the answer will turn out to be yes. As Josef Urban , a longtime leader of the academic AI theorem-proving world put it very concisely: Math has two big functions, it's fun and it's useful. The utility of math should vastly increase as we develop better and better AI-math tools. And yes, we want to be careful this utility is not captured in a few companies, but this particular problem is not happening now... probably largely because the economic value of new math is relatively indirect compared to a lot of other things. The fun of doing math will not go away any more than the fun of playing guitar solos goes away if there are robots that can shred faster than any human. The kinds of fun we can most naturally have will shift, as has happened over and over throughout history. If fancy math prizes or math PhD degrees become infeasible or have to change dramatically, so be it, these were never really the core of math which existed before any of these (in some ways already problematic) social institutions... I remember when I was an academic mathematician, there was a strong vibe that the mathematicians were at the top of the intellectual hierarchy, with physicists just below, then chemists and engineers, then biologists .. and everyone else just barely above the chimpanzees and politicians.... (The physicists also placed themselves at the top, I think, and mostly considered the mathematicians useful but a bit pedantic and misguided, fussing about missing proof details in calculations that had already been successfully compared to experimental data...) -- What we are seeing now I think is the wounding of this sort of overweening math ego... Plus some practical worry about the potential end of "math researcher" as an economically viable profession -- although current tenured profs are probably safe for a while, as governments and universities are unlikely to adapt to exponential change too much till post-Singularity.. Anyway all this is a sideshow to lots of other related major issues/conflicts unfolding concurrently, it's just one that happens to hit close to home as math was where I started my career.. I have been playing with using LLMs and AI agents to try to invent new kinds of math more appropriate for modeling the experiences of agent hives... a different kind of fun. For those curious... 1) Basics of new "distinction calculus" math bengoertzel.substack.com/p/d…| 2) Attempted start of application to beneficial superintelligence, bengoertzel.substack.com/p/f… Soon enough the agents may not need my help with this sort of thing, in which case I will move on to some alternate method of filling spare late evenings ;)