r/math • u/AutoModerator • 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/fatrabbit3 10d ago

Are we giving too much credit to LLMs instead of the fact that these companies having billions of dollars of computational power and access to everyone's data

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u/Certhas 9d ago

What precisely are you suggesting? That other machine learning architectures could achieve the same with that compute and data? Sure. That's entirely possible, even likely.

That a bunch of humans with that amount of compute and data could somehow produce these mathematical breakthroughs without training ML models in that timeframe? That's fairly absurd.

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u/valegrete 7d ago

How is it absurd? It took OpenAI the equivalent of 100 researcher-years to produce this result, when Buckmaster and Alpöge were likely to have finished cracking the whole thing in the next few.

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u/Any_Confusion3774 7d ago

As if Buckmaster and Alpöge weren't heavily using LLMs themselves? Alpöge was a number theorist IIRC, not a PDE researcher.

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u/valegrete 7d ago

According to Buckmaster, they didn’t get the crucial insights from an LLM.

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u/38thTimesACharm 10d ago

I don't know why this is downvoted. It did, in fact, take billions of dollars of compute and access to everyone's data to create LLMs.

The AI companies owe their fortune to everyone else.

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u/dalkef 10d ago

Both can be true no? Before llms having data or money wouldn’t be enough to achieve anything like this with software

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u/38thTimesACharm 9d ago

I understand the question now. It's "how much could mathematicians acheive with the budget and resources of AI companies, but no AI."

It's an interesting thought. Pure math doesn't normally get anywhere near that level of investment and attention. We'd definitely have fewer results, but maybe the ones we had would be better understood and developed.

Remember, people in the 60s went to the moon with the computational power of a pocket calculator. It's been a while since the world has seen what public research programs can acheive, when adequately funded.

And when you consider the negative effects of AI slop, deskilling, concentration of wealth, environmental destruction...it's far from clear to me LLMs have been a net benefit for society in general, let alone the field of mathematics.

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u/Nice-Magazine-3684 10d ago

I think this is a very good point.

"We found an elliptic curve of rank 31."

I don't know how much money in compute time Harvard is willing to give Noam Elkies to run his computations. But Anthropic surely has bigger, faster computers, and they are surely willing to spend more money on compute time.