I get excited at the idea of a world in which advanced mathematical problems (and their solutions) become much more accessible to a much greater number of people. As a result, making mathematics much more loved at a societal level.
Imagine a world where these most complex mathematical problems are not accessible to a few hundred people, but a few hundred thousands people. ...Those original few hundred gifted mathematicians would have an even more prominent role, and their names and achievements would be known by orders of magnitude more people that they are now.
This is the hope, but I suspect the reality is that we see an ever widening gap between the fortunate and the unfortunate. We're looking at the automation and commodification of all knowledge, and the best models will be kept locked behind closed doors so that they can't be stolen. And, of course, "for our own protection".
As a laymen, I wish the same. But I also hope it doesn’t disincentivize those that dedicated themselves to the study
Math department administrators fire Terence Tao.
Based on current reward models, the frontier AI labs will burn down mathematics as an impressive display of capabilities and in doing so, will make it impossible for people that get paid to do mathematics to stay employed.
If your job is literally to publish papers, and OpenAI and Anthropic decide that making an infinite-paper-printing machine is the best thing to show how effective their tech is, then as a demo, they destroy that industry.
I wouldn't expect them to destroy that industry, imagine global squadrons of academics and mathematicians focusing their attention on LLM's, training algorithms, scaling laws, ... they're gonna try and beat the incumbent frontier AI labs, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth
The apocalypse being triggered by frontier labs picking a fight with mathematicians was unexpected.