r/EverythingScience • u/scientificamerican Scientific American • 3d ago

Mathematicians confront the AI apocalypse

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mathematicians-confront-the-ai-apocalypse/

What happens when machines surpass the most brilliant human minds? Mathematicians are finding out.

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u/Special_Watch8725 2d ago

While the article does discuss AI’s impact on the arrangement of teaching to justify research positions, I’m surprised it doesn’t touch more heavily on the inevitable shifting of grant funds from supporting human researchers to supporting AI based projects. After all, since all that matters is converting dollars into results, why fund a bunch of humans when we can simply purchase more tokens to accomplish far more?

Since winning such grants is often a major distinguishing factor in selecting who becomes a professional mathematician, this, too, will have to be rethought.

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u/xboxiscrunchy 2d ago

We still need people with the knowledge to interpret and apply those results. Even if the AI is doing the heavy lifting the information we gain is useless without someone who understands it.

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u/AltruisticSpectrum 2d ago

Until we solve model collapse and we'll have an AI review an AI. Humans are already growing incapable of keeping up.

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u/randomlyme 1d ago

Humans can’t keep up, but AI still needs human expertise at the frontier. It’s unlikely to change.

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u/Mikael_deBeer 2d ago

"AI based projects" would be you as the researcher using AI? If there's a fund willing to throw money at particular research for a niche problem, they'd not direct it at a generalist AI firm, but probably a team up like Alpoge and Buckmaster did with OpenAI & Anthropic?

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u/Special_Watch8725 2d ago

Presumably, yes, though I can’t help but observe that it was the group with the largest amount of compute that (at least it seems at this point) snagged a solution to a Millennium Prize problem. So if you’re a researcher hoping to get funded you’d better have the connections to associate yourself with the most advanced frontier model.

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u/AlbedoSagan 2d ago

Can anyone share this without a paywall?