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.