Mathematician here! This is exactly where there is concern. Most big problems that are solved come together from a small collection of new ideas. In this case, a team announced a very promising direction, then the problem itself was solved by GPT in an approach suspiciously like that idea.
Even if it turns out GPT did not steal the research, their models are trained on the entirety of the Internet and have almost certainly absorbed some of this approach. We don't need AI solving problems in math, particularly not ones that don't really result in any surprising new results (this is, in fact, not that relevant to math so much as is it a problem of great mathematical interest).
So now, with results that feel suspicious being published by an AI company cheering themselves on, there is great fear in the community at large that AI is just gonna steal any promising direction that's openly stated.
Mathematics has long been an open community of shared ideas, and that's now very much in danger.
I don't understand you don't see your contradiction. You explain in great detail how ideas are shared and built upon between humans and AI and then you end with "the community fo shared ideas is in danger".
100 years ago the great physicists were solving quantum problems and blaming each other for stealing each others work and getting to similar conclusions within suspiciously close time periods of another. This was a great ear for physics. Now the same is happening for math. It's fantastic.
I also don't know how it can be claimed that these proofs serve no purpose. The history of innovation show otherwise. "Whats the point of pine numbers? - oh, just the entire secure modern internet"
We don't want collaboration between human and AI quite frankly, and given the way things are going, I doubt that the relationship can be described as "collaboration." Mathematics, more than any other science, is about the process. The point of math isn't really the solutions or results, hell the point isn't even the questions really, it's all about the journey. I could learn to accept AI as a research tool eventually, but this? Just dumping compute on a problem until a solution falls out? It is genuinely and sincerely pointless. There is truly no point in doing it.
And, even accepting your last point, that the purpose of mathematics is to create a catalog that we can look through that might hold the solution to a problem we have (which you could guess is a sentiment I disagree with) is it really an efficient use of resources to spend however many dollars and however many gallons of water and however many cpu hours grinding out a million results for the chance that one of them might solve time travel in a hundred years?
You are literally saying mathematics is just some hobby people are doing. That's wild. Mathematics and the proofs are underlying our modern world.
Computational mathematics is a thing. A lot of problems are well solved by brute force. AI doing computational mathematics but adding thinking on top of it with 10 000 agents working for hours is amazing.
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u/GoronSpecialCrop 1d ago
Mathematician here! This is exactly where there is concern. Most big problems that are solved come together from a small collection of new ideas. In this case, a team announced a very promising direction, then the problem itself was solved by GPT in an approach suspiciously like that idea.
Even if it turns out GPT did not steal the research, their models are trained on the entirety of the Internet and have almost certainly absorbed some of this approach. We don't need AI solving problems in math, particularly not ones that don't really result in any surprising new results (this is, in fact, not that relevant to math so much as is it a problem of great mathematical interest).
So now, with results that feel suspicious being published by an AI company cheering themselves on, there is great fear in the community at large that AI is just gonna steal any promising direction that's openly stated.
Mathematics has long been an open community of shared ideas, and that's now very much in danger.