Yet another Hacker News

Scattered thoughts on how doing math feels these days

29 points surprisetalk 3 days ago 17 comments

springtail5 3 days ago | parent

This is very similar to how I feel programming.

brudgers 2 days ago | parent

Lex Fridman recent podcast on the AI crisis in math, https://youtu.be/ZAzWPE9CItg

kzrdude 1 hour ago | parent

3b1b recent podcast with Steven Strogatz on the Humanity of Math, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUSznTR2cwc

thefourthchime 1 hour ago | parent

About two years ago, I was at a coffee shop and two maths students were trying to understand a concept in the book. I suggested they might ask a language model to help them understand it. They scoffed at me, called a stochastic parrot, and said they can't do math at all.

I responded with, "Well, you don't even need it to do math. It can explain the concept." They scoffed again. "Those things are useless toys"

georgemcbay 1 hour ago | parent

IMO they weren't exactly wrong... 2 years ago.

2 years ago LLMs were a great tech demo but were mostly awful for actual practical purposes and hallucinated almost as much as they got right.

They'd be wrong today, but that's a different thing.

preommr 10 minutes ago | parent

Reading comments like this is so depressing because it was extremely obvious that better results were a matter of time/hardware. It evokes the seem feeling as that trump quote about "who knew healthcare could be so complicated".

idontknowmann 1 hour ago | parent

It’s funny how disconnected we all are from each other. This is exactly how LLMs felt a year or so to many programmers.

Useless toys, sometimes useful toys, ok good toys, ok.. we might have to look at this more carefully, oh god.

This loop however is quite tiring to watch happen over and over again. Is there really nothing we can do but just watch from the sidelines and watch our fellow men engage in their particular grief and copium filled mourning cycle?

timbaboon 1 hour ago | parent

Point 19, right in the feels :(

an0malous 52 minutes ago | parent

The overselling of AI abilities is doing such a disservice to society right now. These companies don’t want to acknowledge how much human collaboration is going into their AI’s achievements because it undermines their value proposition, but I imagine there’s still quite a fair amount going into it and that’s one reason why OpenAI still won’t provide session traces of their models solving open math problems. If they were more transparent about it I think we’d see that human guidance, vision, judgement, taste, and other traits are still highly valuable and complimentary to AI abilities. It should also be a huge red flag how little of any of this output has been formally verified by third parties. I do think AI will eventually do all the things people believe it’s already doing, but I suspect there’s a fair amount of mechanical turking going on behind the scenes as you’d expect any company trying to raise a trillion dollar public offering might do.

Jtarii 10 minutes ago | parent

Are you suggesting the ~500 mathematical results they have released over the past year are primarily human discovered?

I think they would have employ just about every mathematician on earth for that to make sense.

nextaccountic 6 minutes ago | parent

No, but it required non trivial human work

bgandrew1 5 minutes ago | parent

What kind of work?

sdenton4 47 minutes ago | parent

"If you just waited a year, would some other AI produce that same proof independently?"

I had a conversation about this very problem last November, with a visiting mathematician. It's essentially signaling a deflationary spiral in intellectual work: why bother doing the work now, when it will take half as much effort a year from now?

This is perhaps always a possible stance, but it's exacerbated when some proportion of your own agency is handed over to, well, agents.

RealityVoid 32 minutes ago | parent

I like this observation very much. Intellectual deflationary spiral is exactly how it feels at the moment and we might end up in a worse place because of it.

stabbles 20 minutes ago | parent

That's the theme of this reflection: https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/08/why-i-chose-to-do-ma...

augment_me 5 minutes ago | parent

This might hold up for theoretical intellectual work without any economical value, but if you are researching anything that can be applied to the industry, you will instead have 1 year of market ownership and first-mover advantage.

I think it says more about what the value of math as intellectual work is, than about intellectual work in general.

Like if an Egyptian historian would come and say "let's wait one year until the methods are good enough to decrypt this language", no one would be bothered or surprised.