> Looking up at the stars in wonderment, or enjoying a complex puzzle game, or being inspired by an encouraging teacher, and dreaming that one day an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand as part of a marketing gimmick to raise hype for an IPO[2].
But if I am going to critique it's main point it would be this part:
> in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans. It is inefficient to explain or check a result when those resources can be spent generating another.
While obviously ridiculous, I think this does not go far enough. The problem isn't that people don't care and resources should not be spent to explain AI results to human minds, the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans. The puzzle then changes from can AI formally verify and explain a proof to: do human minds trust the proof. Do we believe that the proof is correct and not an elaborate AI hallucination using tricks that are beyond our understanding. In order to trust it a formal verification is not enough unless it is human understandable. In fact human understandability is the only thing that matters. That is something that AI can never do on its own.
The whole point of formal verification is to remove the necessity of understanding most of the work. We only need to trust the formalization of the problem statement, the proof verifier, and the formalization of the result. We already have proof verifiers that humans understand to a high level, and the formalizations of the problem statement and the result are much simpler than the full proof.
I'm confident that the Navier-Stokes equations can blow up because I'm confident that Lean works correctly, and I'm confident that the mathematicians verified the problem statement and result correctly. This is despite the actual proof not being human verified yet (as far as I know), and despite the "human-readable" version not actually corresponding to the formal proof. The formal method still worked.
Beneath the sarcasm it's making a rather simplistic argument that OpenAI cares little about human understanding of the results or their correctness.
The author appears to argue that this in service of a pointless goal, that no one will even care to read the results, and that all this is taking away from human creativity and removing the fun in scientific discovery.
I don't see a convincing argument here that OpenAI does not in fact aim to further humanity's understanding of mathematics, or that using AI for scientific discovery is comparable to automating away the fun parts of life.
The sarcasm is rhetorically strong, but profound? I don't think so.
You’re spot on here by analogy.
...unfortunately it took 57 years to unravel, but the cryptic exploit resulting in our telomeres suddenly expiring took a mere 42.
The state you proclaim to be happy with is one of irresponsible dependency. A retreat to self-infantilization.
It feels like frontier models are starting to approach an asymptote where what you suggest could become reality, and we'll begin seeing not just AI research but AI-designed & led applications of that research into fundamental parts of our society & culture. For better and for worse.
We have moved quite a long way down the "believe the science" road already, and for good reason. Belief is much (!) faster and cheaper than proof, so those who are fed good science(math) and believe it tend to outcompete people who get stuck trying to prove things all the time.
But fraud is fraud regardless of the platform (meat or silicon) committing it. People who believe in frauds often end up worse off for it, though it hard to know which piece of BS has led you astray or who's to blame for it or how to deal with the fall out.
Obviously, we shouldn't believe AI any more than we believe humans. That said, the world was already suffering greatly under the weight of human generated BS long before useful AI came on the scene. Now that AI has reduced the cost of producing plausible BS by orders of magnitude, we may need some new methods for BS detection.
(I assume you mean explain itself to humans here.)
I keep seeing people saying this as fact. It might, but it might not, and there are various reasons one might be skeptical that it will, using current techniques. Not least among these is that explaining something well to a human requires a degree of empathy and sophisticated theory-of-mind that LLMs have not yet exhibited yet*, and that is an area where humans are uniquely advantaged by being humans.
Someone will almost certainly reply by just stating as fact that they will achieve this goal, or pointing out that past predictions that LLMs wouldn't be able to do particular things have failed, and that's all very well. I certainly wouldn't be rash enough to claim it's impossible, but there are still models of all this available that are consistent with all the successes so far but don't predict "LLMs can do anything and will do everything". We'll find out in due course.
(I should clarify that the benchmark here is good human explanations. Of course many humans are capable of producing "explanations" worse than Markov chain text, let alone LLM output.)
* My idle speculation is that a lack of decent theory-of-mind is why LLMs still suck at using the "it's not X it's Y" construct. I doubt they actually use it any more frequently than humans when writing on the same topics, but they use it wrong and it's jarring. This particular rhetorical flourish works when there's some reason to think that X is an idea that might actually be present or forming in the mind of someone reading the passage (or in some other mind that they in turn might be imagining, eg. a fictional character), and that explicitly calling it out and negating it will have a particular dramatic effect. LLMs probably use it with about the expected frequency, but they use it for that reason (frequency) and then come up with something to put in the X and Y slots. The result often jars because the X it uses isn't something pertinent to the reader's thought process and/or the Y isn't a convincing, persuasive or relevant counterpoint to it. I suspect the result is that they stick out and seem more frequent than they are.
He'd have more of a point if a huge number of humans weren't occupied doing exactly this, and much worse on top.
People fundamentally misunderstand the nature of mathematics: it's not "flat" like most of common people's daily pursuits. It consists of building upwards, on top of previous concepts.
In other words, AI is like an oracle: it can tell you all kinds of stuff, but since you probably don't understand, you won't act properly.
Never say never...
And if it fails, and AI goes, "I don't know what happened. I relied on these papers" then I guess one of those must be wrong.
I'm not saying it'd be easy, but I think AI can also find the pieces of the puzzle that broke a pyramid of "discoveries" culminating in a disproval,
And the only other option is to simply never understand as much. AI has the potential to understand things humans cannot. Not necessarily a strict superset.
Humans can deal in 5+-2 things at once. AI doesn't have to, and can cut through leaky abstractions.
If AI says a new invention will do X, and it doesn't, it'll say "you're absolutely right" and try again until it does the thing.
I mean... doomsday scenarios aside.
Well, maybe it’s a good thing that we are seeing this shift. Maybe it is good and right that we begin valuing your ability to exist in the real world, rather than play math puzzles on a sheet of paper. Because, while the AI labs are receiving a lot of attention and excitement now, that’s a short run phenomenon. Ultimately, people aren’t impressed for long by a machine doing something novel. Once it’s up and running, it fades into the background just like the combustion engine, or the dishwasher, or electric lighting.
Not really, they haven't. It's only when those insights can be communicated in such a way to other people that those other people can find utility (which could be enabling them to derive more insights that yet other people find utility in recursively) in the insights that they do so, and this is a huge difference. This is why AI is such a total problem to this mentality, because it disrupts not only insight production but the mechanism that values insight production.
If Ai is something novel for now and then it will be all ok? Just dream on; would you be happy if your job was replaced.. what about your kids.. If that is the case , then enjoy. It is demoralizing for a lot of people who will be replaced by a better thinking machines.
It is no longer about the automation alone but also humans will change to avoid competing with the machine because humans will lose that race just like how they lose when playing chess with the machine.
Why, indeed, is society funding pure mathematics? Many mathematicians are complaining that they do not like AI and their jobs are less fun when AI is involved. But does that matter? Should that matter to the institutions who fund mathematics research?
To me it seems that we fund pure mathematics because we believe that some pure mathematics will end up being useful. Turing was doing "pure mathematics" when he invented the Turing machine, because we didn't have another word for it, yet.
So, which is going to be more useful - the sort of pure mathematics that AI does in 2026, or the sort of pure mathematics that humans do in 2026? That is the debate I would like to see.
If you put the former above the latter, you don't really exist, in a sense.
If one truly philo's sophos, then wouldn't one at least be curious what the computer says about a difficult problem? Like, if you've been wrestling with an especially troublesome integral for years then I feel like that somewhere along the line you should have plugged it into a CAS - even if you want to clean up the derivation afterwards it would be foolish to ignore every tool at your disposal and even rail at the Mathematica authors for the temerity to write a symbolic integrator.
I feel that the article is so preoccupied with clever sarcasm that it doesn't really engage with nuanced views and is instead happy to just spend a few KB of text tearing down vibe research strawmen.
I'm in the office and was trying to contain my laughter next to my colleagues, but this tipped me over the edge
What I’m most curious about is how this impacts our perception of who/what is smart.
Am I the only who thinks this is rhetorical? Modern mathematics is so far removed from the base average knowledge (lets just assume high school instead of going to axioms) that the only people who understand most (if not all new) mathematical achievement are the mathematicians themselves, heck not even all mathematicians, it needs to be spread and developed from "hot spots"?
Your math results are not "well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at" unless you literally operate with two or three levels within the proof paper compared to the average person who probably starts at an order of magnitude levels higher.
To the average person, asking a mathematician to explain something is the same as asking the AI/LLM. Both are asking an oracle to dumb it down to their level of abstraction.
To the person who are not career mathematicians, both LLMs and mathematicians do the same thing, pump out garbled output that they themselves understand, and to mathematicians, the difference is one probably explains using axioms rather than theorems.
Now with LLMs the process is much shorter. They can walk me through the algorithm step by step, translate it to pseudocode, explain equations, and most importantly, I can ask them questions and get clarifications, without worrying about seeming ignorant or exhausting their patience. With a paper, you’re stuck with whatever was written (and often, researchers aren’t good teachers, or intentionally over complicate simple concepts).
Yep, my eyes glaze over at the convoluted mathematical explanations for pathfinding in worldspace, but when I see the pseudocode in the appendix it make so much more sense.
It is so much harder and more stressful than my php/jquery mini saas coding days.
Often at work I start thinking "why are we doing all this? Why does anyone want this fancy reception desk?? This desk is not worth the human aggravation that it's causing."
I genuinely start thinking we should go back to concrete eastern European communist type buildings just for the simplicity and efficiency. Why all this fancy stuff that causes every project engineer, superintendent, and subcontractor Engineering department to get grey hair.
But I guess it makes the economy grow. I don't know.
I read something interesting recently that some huge percentage of society, all genders, all classes etc etc hate modern architectural compared to classic architectural style. The only people that like are architects and/or architecture students. Amusing tid bit. Could also be complete junk when I drive all over Australia and see white/grey render & black trim absolutely everywhere. Yuck.
I'm currently working on metal hallways portals that are 10' tall, except the material is only 8', and the seams are ugly, so several people are designing solutions on how to split the span up And what kind of reveal to do so the edge/seam is nice. Why? Why does this hallway need a metal cap at the end of it?
well yeah the purpose of STEM education is to be a factory to produce the correct worker for another factory
What about the Collatz conjecture? AFAIK, it requires some novel approaches to mathematics, which would be a real testament to AI creative skills.
I don't doubt it will be solved some day, but as of now it's too early to say that all our problems are solved.
It started with internet which was subsidized through military for sake of military supremacy and then it transformed to become a utility connecting everything and collecting information and it subsidized by the markets to collect rent from the world using this utility and now it is subsidized to replace labor around the world by knowing everything that humans know and to collect rent from its use to discount labor.
There's a library of babel simulator here: https://libraryofbabel.info/
Just hit "random." It's always gibberish. The odds of getting something that isn't gibberish are astronomically low, like winning the lottery.
The actual library Borges describes has 25^1312000 books, the very vast majority of which are utter nonsense. (As the simulator makes clear.)
Yet with AI, we're getting an abundance of very credible -- and, as Tao himself notes, frequently correct -- mathematical proofs. In these new AI math results, the ratio of signal to noise is high, which makes our current situation the exact opposite of the library, which is pure noise where signal emerges only by random necessity.
Causes:
Failure to detect and appreciate irony and metaphor
Failure to engage with core critique > Fortunately, OpenAI has brought us one step closer to realizing Borges’s vision. Rather than generating every possible mathematical paper, they’ve found a way to probabilistically generate things that look correct.
// actually FIRST they came for the programmers. and many of us were ultimately ULTIMATELY pretty tickled to get such a massive productivity boost. this anti-AI sentiment as seen here and in Jon Stewart's rant that all AI is good for is optimizing shopping carts or something... it's so upsetting see good folks buying into this and not realizing how much benefit it will bring. If anything, I've seen how much amazing power it has now given programmers such as myself... I can do what would take me years in an afternoon.
// Btw, can we retire the "first they came for the..." template, it's a little tired.
Now we are told explaining, understanding things, asking new questions is more important than proving things. So where is the math community medals/awards for this job?
Very much worth nothing for those about to read this! haha I got a couple of paragraphs in and shook my head.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/12/politics/data-center-backlash...
Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?
Is it collective mental illness? Economic hysteria? A cult of virtual personality?
It's simultaneously irrational, obsessive, ecologically and politically catastrophic, and all-consuming - none of which are good things.
Datacenters in space are visionary -- they are maximally energy rate dense and they expand the area of energy absorption. Might be 100 years too early but that is where we are headed, after we turn all of the available biosphere of earth into computronium, that is.
The only superior technology left would be von Neumann probes.
> Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?
Money. Capitalism. It's all a fucking grift. Always has been.
If you thought AI was going to usher in a post scarcity golden age of infinite wealth where all disease, hunger, want and inequality are solved and everyone gets to live their lives purely for pleasure and intellectual pursuit, where the Eschaton is in their Heaven and all is right in the world, and humanity spreads out amongst the stars as beings of transcendent posthuman machine intellect or some shit you read in a sci-fi book then congratulations, you're the mark.
... the fact that this shit doesn't even scrape the ass of more than 500 million people, 60% of which are utterly useless with or without (mit oder mit ohne) ... neither sacrasm, nor cnysims or inorys will uplift this worst of all narratives ever written.
this is all soooooo baaaaaad
if I had guaranteed access to housing, healthcare, and food I'd stop immediately
right now my contract is more or less "we'll keep paying you if you continue providing us with the arbitrary value we require" which is certainly more difficult to reckon with
You can sense the fear and anxiety in the article.
Is existence not enough anymore? Do humans need more?
I have a degree in Economics. I have read Adam Smith (and not just the Wealth of Nations, by the way!). I spent years on this stuff. I understand markets and for some things they are indeed the best solution. No argument there.
It is a FACT that some things in life should not be done for profit.
Will protection of these fields help the average person or country to survive and accumulate resources?
All I needed was entering a game of Monopoly after a few rounds had already been played.
But for everything else, the profit motive is unsurpassed at allocating scarce resources to their most productive uses.
The luddites and doomers should do the world a favor and go establish a commune in rural Alaska, then they can be happy and the rest of us can get back to building and playing with amazing technology!
The luddites were rational.
Telling people to fuck off and go away when they were here first is hideous. You should be humiliated. You should feel unwelcome.
The climate effect argument against AI is so intellectually dishonest. It’s the same as saying that Tao is on the side of stopping the advancement of Cancer research.
I thought the people clowning him were dumb, but the people arguing for either side are really fighting on a mud pit.
Grim but this is exactly where society is heading.
Some of those people were mathematicians, engineers, physicists who found joy in being skilled at what they do and were able to be financially rewarded for their effort applying their skill. Are these artistic pursuits, subcultures, pick-up leagues, etc going to pay their mortgage? Will they help them get a job in a field they are trained in?
The "free to pursue more important things" is a hand-wavy statement that doesn't talk at all about what those people should be doing to provide for themselves after wages plummet. The hyperbole is drawing attention to the ridiculousness, not making a comment about there not being a rec soccer league or something.
I would really push back on this
What you're describing _is_ the beaten path. People who argue with bots on twitter are actually, vastly, the minority.
Go to your local park or bar and have a drink and try not to talk about the internet.
Because most people in the world are working around the clock to supply food and shelter for their family. It's a bit unclear still how you are going to consolidate the two facts
Those are hardly the "most people in the world are working around the clock to supply food and shelter for their family"
It's a bit unclear still how you are going to consolidate the two facts.
Make it your problem to find problems that AI have not yet solved. Problem solved.
The toxicity of apps like Tiktok comes from muscle memory, not the quality of the content. Your thumb knows where the app icon is and opening the app happens quicker than you can think (literally). So offloading or uninstalling breaks this very effectively. The only thing that would still keep you on the platform is social connections. If somebody gets upset over you uninstalling Instagram or Snapchat, they aren't a good friend.
There is no Utopia for mankind at the end of an AGI that is the labor force because people need a purpose; without that, degenerate behaviours and vice are easy to fall into and the spiral is not big. The state of the human race - particularly the internet-native generations - is a testament to that.
The only way the AGI Utopia works is with a massive reduction in the human population with a Spartan/Helot relationship between those remaining.
Let's face it, the people who want AGI so badly aren't the wam cuddly people who want to feed the poor, house the homeless, and cure the sick. Their motives here are not pure...
For you, maybe. You can't assume that applies to everyone.
I mean I still do it here to some extent but much less frequently
guilty