Super interesting interview of soon-to-be Fields medalist @Jacob_Tsimerman about (1) his LLM assisted research process and (2) worries about the future. H/T to @ProfNoahGian for the link and @sioroberts for the excellent journalistic work, as always. I think my AI-avoidant colleagues should pay close attention to Part (1) as I think we’re clearly at an inflection point in AI-facilitated discoveries. This doesn’t have to be fancy: just use these tools to brainstorm and try out different strategies in parallel and use it to learn new things. People with PhDs have an incredible baseline to bootstrap from! FWIW, I think as long as we continue to support humans—ideally with labor protections or UBI—we are at the dawn of a golden era and that Tsimerman is overly pessimistic in Part (2) of his interview, excerpted below. He seems to doubt whether we need human mathematicians as AI operators, but this is already jumping to a vision where AI automates everything, including aesthetic! I think this underestimates how tightly coupled aesthetic and will/desire are coupled, but AI systems currently don’t have wills or desires. I suspect that comes from being embodied, which forces some singularity of consciousness to navigate competing thought patterns, or whatever leads to this “user illusion” most of us have. Anyhow, while humans still exist and have the will to learn and grow, I actually think university professors’ twin roles as researchers and educators will save our relevance for at least a little while longer. When we’re not at the frontlines of research (where the big money is), we’re adjacent to the front lines, but we’re also adjacent to humans with only some basic 18 years of curriculum learning under their belts. Spanning these two different fronts of knowledge distillation is arguably going to get harder as they become more spread out. I think there is a real argument to made that the PhD will be the new standard professional degree if you want a job. It’s just that the jobs are going to get more advanced too. Also, read Hollis Robbin’s @anecdotal piece on “AI and the Last Mile” on what education could look like in the future. Anyhow, existential crisis Part (2) from the Tsimerman interview below: Q: Have you discussed the intersection of AI and math much with other mathematicians? A: Yeah, I have a lot of conversations. I’m pretty worried about AI in general — in math, and otherwise. Q: Worried how? A: I think there’s a good chance AI will lead to human extinction. I also think, separately from that, that AI will be better than mathematicians at math very soon...[see link for more] I think it’s going to make being a mathematician not a profession anymore. I don’t think mathematics is unique in that. I do think it might come sooner in math than in other places. Because math is much fewer soft skills; it’s much easier to train yourself. Once you have Lean and the LLMs integrated you can just go — go experiment, learn, prove stuff. Q: Do you think there will still be a human role in terms of ideas and creativity? A: I think there will be a point where AI will be strictly better than humans at all aspects of math: learning, proving, coming up with the problems, aesthetics. It will just be better at everything. And this will come pretty soon. Q: How soon is pretty soon? A: Five years? I think in two years it might already be better than us at proving stuff. We’ll be able to say to it: “Here is a statement, go prove it.” But I have wide bars of uncertainty around this stuff. It’s hard to predict the future. t.co/IKgho9WEHa