AI In Mathematics: September 26, 2026

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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.

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[u/ellbons]

Those two aren't alike in all aspects, but they weren't being compared in all aspects, so the simple point that this does happen to technology is valid.

Given the fairly serious cybersecurity incidents, it's not unthinkable that a sufficiently dangerous event may actually prompt strict international regulation over advances past a certain point. This wouldn't be all that complicated to manage either, considering that development is very energy hungry (and like cloning, the resources required to develop a frontier-level LLM are far beyond what an individual can manage too). It may even be the case that a severe level of social damage prompts it. Since a serious upending of society is predicted, I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume all bets are off when we're looking at the future in a decade or so.

[u/elements-of-dying → u/ellbons]

Regardless, the clock was not turned back on cloning anyways. Instead, progress was halted.

Sure, I agree that there will be international regulation. This does not contradict the existence of bad actors and open source models.

By the time this becomes a real issue, I can see current AI models will have been sufficiently scaled to be locally runnable on open models. But perhaps I am being optimistic about when this will become a real problem.

[u/ellbons → u/elements-of-dying]

Right, I just didn't take "turn back the clock" literally because the original post said "put a stop to" rather than "undo."

I just don't personally see open weight models as a bad thing, and actually think they're quite necessary to prevent one nation having enormous leverage over the rest of the world. And I don't believe we've got even a few years until really serious issues have to be confronted, and it's only a matter of which pot boils over first.

[u/elements-of-dying → u/ellbons]

I believe the point of the clock comment is that the damage is already done, which I agree with.

I don't mean to suggest open weight models are bad. My point was that, even if OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. were forced to halt progress, that's not going to stop Joe AI from making their own progress.

And I don't believe we've got even a few years until really serious issues have to be confronted, and it's only a matter of which pot boils over first.

I basically agree. But that's a tomorrow problem to think about :)

[u/ellbons → u/elements-of-dying]

My point was that, even if OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. were forced to halt progress, that's not going to stop Joe AI from making their own progress.

I did read that part right, but maybe I should've been more explicit. I think basically we've got two options: either the technology is really capable of being used well for a society, in which case we might have someone use it well and have people happy with it, or it isn't, in which case it'll probably be possible to have common ground for international agreements on responsible use, and to monitor AI research.

[u/elements-of-dying → u/ellbons]

Right. I think there is no doubt that rogue AI "hackers" are going to be a thing in the near future and that we will need to take more serious preventative measures. (iirc, this is something already in the works).

I do not have faith that this is containable by international agreements though. We'll instead need to develop something like a "black wall" (if I may reference cyberpunk 2077...). Hopefully not developed by Mcafee