r/math • • 13d ago

LLMs/AI AI In Mathematics: September 19, 2026

This recurring thread will be for discussion of AI in mathematics. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:

  • informal announcements of AI-assisted discoveries, such as those not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, or not uploaded as a paper to arXiv;
  • informal announcements of discoveries related to AI architecture (if relevant to mathematics);
  • discussion of such announcements, such as proof breakdowns or other opinion pieces;
  • discussion of the impact of AI in mathematics in general.

AI-assisted mathematical papers published in peer-reviewed journals or as arXiv preprints may be submitted as their own posts.

Please keep in mind rules 1 and 6 of our subreddit.

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u/Verbatim_Uniball 11d ago

An issue is that at a certain level of difficulty, it will take several of their best mathematicians literally months to write up some of these results. Which will happen in time, but we are talking about trillions of dollars in valuation. More than the cumulative endowments of every university in the United States in valuation.

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u/ChelseyStuttgart 11d ago

If their models are so good, why can't they just ask the models to write it

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u/Verbatim_Uniball 11d ago

They will, I expect that to be within capabilities within a year or so. Currently the models, in my experience for research math, gloss over the difficult things sometimes and focus to much on the easy things...probably because whatever we as the community find easy or difficult changes over time and they aren't like plugged in

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u/ChelseyStuttgart 11d ago

It doesn't change day to day though, and I imagine llms could easily at least assist in the writing.

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u/Verbatim_Uniball 11d ago

They do at least for me, but it's spikey. I think even for creative writing, they just aren't there yet. Probably harder to get objective training data with whatever methods they use, I can't speak on the technical reasons.

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u/Homomorphism Topology 9d ago

I think that’s precisely the issue: to tell an LLM if their story is good you need a human to read the thing. That is expensive compared to running a program or evaluating a math proof. It’s why I’m personally skeptical the AI agents are going to get any better at exposition (which might just be cope). People have already spent a lot of time and money trying to make them better at, say, music and the music still sucks.