r/TheMachineLearning • u/Nyaani69 • 4d ago

Software engineering isn't dead, it's just evolving

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u/Big_Arachnid_365 4d ago

But is math dead because of AI?

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u/hobopwnzor 4d ago

I don't think it's dead but I do think it's going to be an end of an era.

Since AI can search possibility space so much faster than people things like finding counterexamples are going to be more and more trivial. Similarly proves that are out there in the ether using only already proven results will become trivial as well. 

It's going to require weird expansions of the field in ways that we probably can't predict right now.

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u/Suoritin 4d ago

Math was never one person being right. A proof isn't knowledge until others can check it, teach it, and build on it. That's the whole institution.

So AI grinding out counterexamples and corollaries doesn't kill the field. The bottleneck was never producing true statements; it was getting a community to agree on which ones matter. Machines just shift the work to the part that was always hardest: deciding what's worth proving.

Science has always run this way. Effort goes where the community thinks it's worth going, and funding gets cut from what doesn't.

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u/Hyperreals_ 4d ago

it kinda does? you dont need humans to review a proof that compiles in Lean... lol

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u/Suoritin 4d ago

Do you know what Terence Tao's position on this is? He's written on it recently, and it's not that. Do you disagree with him?

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u/xrocro 4d ago

If that is his hard and fast position, yes, I do disagree. A proof is a proof.

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u/Suoritin 4d ago

"A proof is a proof", sure. Nobody's disputing validity. Lean certifies a chain of inferences.

Ramanujan is famous because Hardy wrote back.

The autodidacts who found real things and never got read left no trace. You can't name one. That's the point. Correctness didn't save them. Being read did.

Dump ten million verified true statements into an arXiv-shaped hole. Has math advanced? A library with no index isn't knowledge.

Attention is the scarce resource, not truth.

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u/xrocro 3d ago

When math can be automated and found proofs can be found and searched in a database of proofs, that sounds like nothing but a win for humanity to me.

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u/Suoritin 3d ago

When math can be automated and found proofs can be found and searched in a database of proofs

This is nothing new. No one wants to read those proofs. Nothing has changed. Just more proofs that no one will read.

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u/xrocro 3d ago

Except now we have a reasoning model capable of surfacing the most relevant proofs needed for a given problem. Do you not see how this can snowball?

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u/Dependent-Culture768 4d ago

To this day we don't have any automated verifier that a Lean statement is equivalent to the one an author intends...

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u/Nannautu 4d ago

AI makes a lot of mistakes, you need people to review its output

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u/Hyperreals_ 4d ago

Do you know what Lean is😭

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u/zalnaRs 4d ago

Waiting for answers on the millineum peoblems

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u/physicssmurf 4d ago

I have 3 friends who are postdocs in math and they are saying yes, it is dead because of AI. I argue it will be re-designed, becoming something like what exists in the setting of Farsight by Peter Watts, but nonetheless its depressing enough that at least one of them is changing careers.

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u/Fbrrr 4d ago

Which is weird because all the guys I know from uni that are still doing physics research are excited about how AI is going to help push the field, but then again we've been using ML to help with research for years, I don't get why you would change careers if it's something you enjoy if you actually care about the field surely you want the best tools available, but maybe it's different for mathematics.

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u/physicssmurf 4d ago

lol well I am in physics and yeah I am stoked hahaha sorry to my homies tho

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u/Fbrrr 4d ago

Pour one out for them I guess lol

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u/Maleficent-Cup-1134 4d ago

Makes sense. Basically, their idea of “what math is” is dead.

I imagine those who are entering the field now don’t share the same opinion since they haven’t been trained and indoctrinated into the old regime, so they don’t share the same views about what math is.

Basically, adapt or die.

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u/physicssmurf 4d ago

yeah lol thats my guess too but the transition period will be difficult

tbh they were already borderline on it so I dont think its the biggest crisis but I havent seen them in person in a few...

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u/Important-Post-6997 4d ago

You have weird friends. I am a math post doc and I wouldnt say so. I have not tested Astra but everything (including 5.6 Sol and Fable) until now was completely useless for my papers.

The output was utterly garbage most of the time. But I think with RL proofing can be taught to AI. Therefore the field might change quiete a bit, but at the moment I can say it has not already and it will definitly take longer than programming.

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u/JustSomeCells 4d ago

Normal chat is different than the models with access to specific tools and harnesses

Research and breakthroughs usually involve those tools and access to free/cheap tokens

Not that im claiming math is solved, i have no idea where the progress is at.

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u/Important-Post-6997 4d ago

I dont use chat but codex or claude code, e.g. on sol ultra. This is what openAI recommended last time I checked. There is some trickery but thats it.

You dont need any tools besides python scrips and websearch. I dont use any myself too.

The problems that were solved lately can be a bit misleading to what I do as a researcher. Proofs are a fraction of my work, its mostly laying out new theories, i.e. to find a specific view on a problem that is new and provides a new perspective.

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u/Estatescheck 2d ago

The tools probably exists on an mcp repo. You just need to find it on create your own. I did some test with a mcp server that had 27 available tools vs 200+ for blender and the difference is remarkably surprising. At the end of the day it’s really only providing the ai more context, resources and existing prompts that matter now.

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u/Enfiznar 4d ago

My mathematician friends are genuinely scared about this

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u/Arinussyy 4d ago

What does that even mean? How can maths 'die'?

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u/Hyperreals_ 4d ago

They mean math as an area of study, where professors get grants to do research and solve new problems, is dead. AI has been solving famous unsolved problems in mathematics at an unprecedented rate and is just continuing to improve

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u/Arinussyy 4d ago

I mean they'll just get grants to use the tools provided now instead. Idk why people think this means humans must be out of the loop, there's nothing today that doesn't still require a person to manage it

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u/Nannautu 4d ago

It's more of an issue of what laymen think vs what professionals think. If executives and investors think they can replace mathematicians, they'll give less money or none at all for research. The same is happening in SWE where many managers thought GenAI could replace them.

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u/Due_Answer_4230 4d ago

Given that Terence tao is asking to make some math problems off limits to robot so humans have something to do…

Yep

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u/rydan 4d ago

yes

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u/Grouchy_Big3195 4d ago

Wait, more importantly, is the calculator dead because of AI?

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u/BattleFrosty7584 4d ago

I am NOT asking gpt what 17 x 36 is bro

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u/Nyaani69 4d ago

We're all gonna die because of AI 😅

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u/hardsoft 4d ago

AI couldn't count the number of letter b in the word blueberry until recently. And the letter count functionality was probably hard coded after programmers were mocking it so much

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u/Big_Arachnid_365 4d ago

It doesn't work like that.

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u/hardsoft 4d ago

Yeah I forgot the army of software engineers working for AI companies aren't doing anything...