GoKawiilAstronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God, Jan Matejko (1873)
I thought we had another year or so until we got a Millennium prize problem. We can rationalize all we want — It's just a counterexample disproof! It's not building new theory! — but the Navier-Stokes blowup is the Navier-Stokes blowup. Maybe that was just a low-hanging Millennium prize problem, and the other ones will be harder. I mean, that's almost necessarily the case, given that this one was the first one OpenAI proved after attempting them all in parallel. Plus, wasn't a lot of the line of thought that resulted in the construction already done by humans?
For now, the humans still need to point the AIs at the problems. But whatever the 'qualitative difference' objection is that you may have... it's on the scaling curve. We will not see another human Millennium problem. At least, not human-alone. Congratulations to the OpenAI team for their achievement. Congratulations to Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpoge on their work as well, and also damn.
This is the future of mathematics. The era of the human mathematician is ending, if not ended. The cyborg mathematician receives a brief but glorious ascendance. But in the end, the models, and the models alone, will win.
The mathematicians are trying to figure it out, trying to adapt; they have their Leiden declaration, their Association for Human Mathematics. They have their 'urges for concern':
“It is a powerful tool, and I think it will be a great tool to accelerate mathematics research,” Dr. Matchett Wood said in an interview. But she noted that the community needs to figure out how to use A.I. “in a way that will maintain human understanding of the mathematics.”
It will not be a tool to accelerate mathematics research. It will be the mathematics research. What we understand as the practice of research mathematicians today has already begun to die. The future of the human mathematical community, and eventually all scientific communities, is the practice of priests, then that of monks. Not researchers.
The priest
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