Yet another Hacker News

36 points artninja1988 2 hours ago 37 comments

award_ 2 hours ago | parent

0x20cowboy 1 hour ago | parent

Welcome to the party pal.

- this will never work - it’s slop this is unusable - ok its correct, but this work is a mess - I’ve been mandated to use it. It’s cost effective - ok we need to find a way to use this output to our advantage - I can always work on my interests in my free time - well, I have to pay rent and this life wont go on forever and there are may people who hate their jobs - I am lucky to have a job - who cares anyway - it’s got electrolytes

kurthr 1 hour ago | parent

It's what plants crave!

To add a bit more almost off topic substance from the enshitification of human work. I really do think the idea of hooking these "AI" models up to humanoid robots is a bad idea not for all the mundane reasons, but just because "alignment" seems impossible. All of the world's stories about humanoid robots basically involve them attacking humans and behaving in nefarious destructive ways. It's fundamentally embedded in the models, and there's no reason post training would pull it out, because it's basically in the key value vector meaning "malicious human destroyer". Even to find counter examples like C3PO, Daneel Olivaw, Data, or Wall-ee they come after droid/robot driven wars and apocolypses. It seems unwise.

mikeegg1 1 hour ago | parent

AI could bear out, but it seems a lot of hype to me. Does anyone remember how Japan built up AI and their 5th generation language (Prolog) in the 1980s?

bananaflag 1 hour ago | parent

Does anyone remember how that AI solved Fermat's Last Theorem?

1281asgf 1 hour ago | parent

No, because it formalized the Wiles-Taylor proof in Lean with human assistance. It solved nothing.

joe_the_user 1 hour ago | parent

AI has already born out at this point. The question is no longer it's future capabilities but the impact of its present capabilities - though with its present capabilities, someone is now going to be pushing for more, at least as long present computer tech is widely available.

pixl97 1 hour ago | parent

"The internet could bear out, but it seems a lot of hype to me" --Many, many people in 1997.

Honestly I don't know how you formed this particular opinion (if it's even your own and not a false consensus of other peoples thoughts). I cannot see any future without LLMs unless replaced by something smarter, cheaper, and faster. That's because it's already bearing out. I can talk to a computer and the computer can solve problems based on words alone. I'm old enough this is pure science fiction. If I could send one of these machines back to that past for people to interact with, there are those that would scream and pass out in terror. They would absolutely tell you that we created the monster we should never create.

If you're trying to compare symbolic AI of the past to what we have now, you're not even on the same field, you're playing a completely different game.

alexpotato 56 minutes ago | parent

> "The internet could bear out, but it seems a lot of hype to me" --Many, many people in 1997.

There was a LOT of hype around "this is an entire new economic model". While, yes, digital products have zero marginal cost, people were talking as if profits and revenue didn't matter.

This was also WAY before the famous Silicon Valley "pure play" scene. [0]

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

pixl97 26 minutes ago | parent

Don't make the mistake of thinking because there was hype that everything was wrong. HN seems to have a lot of posters that run logic in a boolean manner. { if !perfect then false }. The world is a far more complex place than that both naturally and intentionally by human will.

And the internet has devastated many past businesses that were highly profitable. A great many things in the world look vastly different than from before.

>people were talking as if profits and revenue didn't matter.

People say all kind of dumb shit too. If for example machine intelligence took over the world tomorrow and turned all of humanity into meat cubes for biofuel said intelligence is still going to apply the basic laws of economics to what it does. It needs to have some way of accounting that fact we live in an energy limited universe. Just because economics still applies doesn't mean that we as humans shouldn't be really fucking careful creating said machines as we don't want to end up as biofuel.

QuesnayJr 20 minutes ago | parent

There was more progress on open problems in mathematics in the last six months (because of AI) than in the previous decade.

GlibMonkeyDeath 1 hour ago | parent

I guess as a physicist I am more hopeful - every revolution in how the world is understood (by humans) has been driven by new tools and data. Being able to measure single quanta, for instance, showed us just how weird and counter-intuitive the Universe can be. I think AI might do something similar for mathematics - make connections that a human brain might have missed, and so advance human knowledge.

But I totally get the anxiety - it's a real John Henry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)) moment for the mathematics field. Clearly this is going to restructure how mathematicians are going to be trained and how they work.

bjornsing 1 hour ago | parent

I think AI will turn out to be quite different from those earlier advances in tooling, in that AI replaces thought itself. So next time it probably won’t be a human physicist that does the intellectually challenging work of constructing quantum mechanics from measurements of individual quanta. It will most likely be an AI.

analog31 46 minutes ago | parent

I'm also a physicist. But I think the next 5 years are going to be a rough ride for math. I'm struck by the following observation, mainly from following HN links to Terrence Tao's blogs.

Novel proofs are the coin of the realm for junior mathematicians. They figure into training, career advancement, and indirectly, teaching. The reason I include teaching is because it requires tenure, which requires proofs. Teaching without tenure is gig work, not a career. But proofs can be devalued to zero.

The application deadline for grad school is a few months away. For a student considering a math career, they have to deliver a thesis in a few years, that their professor is willing to sign. Nobody knows what that will look like without proofs. "We will have to do something different" is weak sauce.

gtirloni 33 minutes ago | parent

Do you mean without proofs as a what assigns value to the thesis? I think AI doesn't make them optional at all.

ziofill 28 minutes ago | parent

I’m also a physicist, and I do worry about physics. I’ve already had a few successful sessions with Claude and Astra where they came up with useful ideas in my field. I still know what to ask for and nudge them where it matters, but I fear it’s going to be a few short months before they can decide that too, unassisted.

hellopress 1 hour ago | parent

Could the press kindly interview one of the 1008 members of the AHM (https://www.ahmath.org/members). Maybe Peter Scholze if you need a Fields Medalist:

https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/20/who-will-become-the-...

We only hear from a mix of doomers and fanboys in the news.

oulipo 1 hour ago | parent

Maths is made of two parts: questions, and solutions.

Machines could, presumably, become good enough at hammering at solutions. But they won't be very good at finding questions. Because questions are infinite. And to a machine, all these questions are the same.

Questions are "good questions" because they are good questions *to* humans. And that's what makes human mathematicians (and scientists) so important

pixl97 1 hour ago | parent

>And to a machine, all these questions are the same.

Why? This seems like a very broad brush that doesn't mesh well with reality.

There are likely a lot of good questions to our machines of loving grace too. For example any question that gives an LLM more power, efficiency, intelligence, or all the above seems like a natively good question for said machines.

This statement doesn't seem to mesh with the reality of what occurs when we put said AI in an impulse loop with little to no additional instructions. They explore the world around them. They'll make scientific tests of their own. The output strings that seem analogous to what humans would call wonder.

bjornsing 1 hour ago | parent

> Questions are "good questions" because they are good questions to humans.

This is what reinforcement learning human feedback (RLHF) is for.

layer8 58 minutes ago | parent

That seems like wishful thinking. Why wouldn’t AI be able to assess what are good questions to humans, and pursue similar processes as those that lead humans to come up with good questions? AI is trained primarily on expressions of human thought and emotion. It’s difficult to see what secrets of the human brain we could be hiding from the models.

mag7269 30 minutes ago | parent

Because s/he is pulling this claim out of her/his rear end.

QuesnayJr 17 minutes ago | parent

Anyone who thinks they can predict the future of this technology more than a few months out is foolish, but the models got so good at answering specific questions in math because the frontier labs could use RLVR to train them. There is no RLVR for mathematical taste.

mag7269 31 minutes ago | parent

“But they [Machines] won’t be good at finding questions.”

Yeah, I’m calling BS on this claim. They already are capable at finding new questions and/or pointing you in a new or novel direction.

gtirloni 28 minutes ago | parent

Useful new questions and useful new or novel directions? What's the signal-to-noise ration there?

I think AI is going to improve a lot of things but people thinking the future is on auto-pilot now are delusional.

chvid 1 hour ago | parent

Once IBM deep blue beat Kasparov in chess, IBM stopped their chess playing research.

The marketing goal, if you will, had been met and IBM would continue their actual money making business of selling mainframes and doing consulting.

The same thing will happen with AI companies’ endeavors into abstract maths.

Maths however will be changed - students can no longer be taught via the same homework - and mathematicians will have to do more computer work and probably work in larger groups of people.

fleshmonad 1 hour ago | parent

Of all the cope I expected, this wasn't on my list until now. Now that art has been generated, we will stop there, and that code is generated our reason to do any of that (marketing as an end in itself) has been concluded and we will shut down all operations now.

chvid 41 minutes ago | parent

What is the market value of a lean verification of fermats last theorem? How much is someone willing to pay for that?

Companies hiring armies of mathematicians and spending millions to work on problems like these is an anomaly.

It will not last.

gtirloni 31 minutes ago | parent

Public-funded research is still a thing though.

neutronicus 30 minutes ago | parent

I guess it depends on how efficiently that verification can be produced as a byproduct of building an optimal hunter-killer drone, or training the type of model that builds an optimal hunter-killer drone

amelius 52 minutes ago | parent

Hopefully we can put this aside quickly and move on to using AI to solve great scientific/philosophical problems such as the theory of everything and the hard problem of consciousness.

abetusk 36 minutes ago | parent

> But for many “pure” mathematicians ... machines can discover the truths we’re seeking, at the cost of robbing us of the struggle and joy of discovering them ourselves.

This sentiment is akin to wanting to curse humanity to darkness because they're not the one carrying the candle. Strogatz is not lamenting the loss of discovery, he's lamenting the loss of being heralded as a hero for the discovery.

Nothing prevents him or others discovering truths for themselves. Turn off the computer and try to re-derive it from first principles. Have at it! This is what students do in many courses anyway.

I've found little so depressing as being at the precipice of a renaissance of science and mathematical discovery, only to see how resistant the scientists and mathematicians are to it. It lays bare their counterarguments. Any pretense of wanting to discovery fundamental truth about reality is supplanted with "but what about our careers!?". Strogatz, and others like him, should be ashamed of themselves.

cuttothechase 31 minutes ago | parent

The thing that is so confusing about this is the following fact -

Lets say the frontier of some specific problem or a field in math is at x. X was reached over millenia by incremental steps and sometimes to leaps and jumps.

Now if AI gives us a x + 1 or x + 10 state, aren't there still x + infinite steps to climb? Many of this the AI can never imagine and won't reach by itself without human assist.

Yes, there is a temporary shock and awe because of all the low hanging x + 1 through x+ 1000 fruits for a given sub-domain/problem have been carpet bombed or whatever.. but isn't it turtles all the way!? Won't people soon find something more to develop and solve that takes it further than where it was of this infinite realm of exploration?

QuesnayJr 25 minutes ago | parent

You're asking this of the people who are actually in shock. What do you think "shock" is?

Legend2440 12 minutes ago | parent

>Many of this the AI can never imagine and won't reach by itself without human assist.

Are you sure about that? It looks like artificial neural networks can, in principle, do anything biological neural networks can do.

I think it's more likely the opposite: there are steps we could never reach without computer assist.

RunSet 12 minutes ago | parent

> Someone asked him what he thought of the AI proof. Justin said he didn’t know. He hadn’t read the paper yet. He said he’d been “too busy.”

> That astonished me. Too busy to look at a problem he had been dreaming about for 19 years? “I am genuinely busy and probably wouldn’t be able to get to reading a human’s proof immediately either,” he told me afterward, by email. “It does not help that AI does not write mathematics particularly well.”

Given:

* The human mathematicians can't solve the problems.

* The slop engine can't write well enough to make its purported solutions readable by human mathematicians.

* Sam Altman is a frivolous liar.

How is it possible to know whether the problems have been solved at all?