A mathematician who quit academia says AI will kill the 'theorem economy' — and maybe save math (davidbessis.substack.com)
His distinction is Mathlib versus Mathslop: human-curated formal math you can understand, versus AI output that's correct and unreadable — a 200,000-line proof no one comprehends. If status flows only to proving, and machines prove best, mathematicians become obsolete.
The thread pushed back from two sides. A non-mathematician shrugged: if unreadable-but-correct theorems let us build useful things, who cares? Another reached for Greg Egan's 'truth mining' — and the one edge humans keep, for now: today's models are still weak at visual reasoning.
Sign in to save