Does that mean AI is not doing something useful? If it provides a proof, it gives direction to human mathematicians who can then develop an understanding, give talks, be questioned about the topic, and teach. Is that not a useful service?
It might well be useful if the RIGHT proofs are evaluated and proven. Figuring out what will be useful has always been a real challenge in math. Finding certain symmetries and mappings between problems in different domains, might well be useful even if they aren't well understood? That has always been another part of the work of mathematicians. Of course there are those who just work on the beauty of things, and few in the 80s would have thought that prime factoring number theory or elliptic curves would be the basis for modern communications and banking.
That said, getting a point solution and not knowing the path to get there, is certainly much less useful, and generalization is much harder. Again, more work for mathematicians, but maybe without the easy "I solved it" proof metric for rewards. Goodhart's law strikes again.
Less useful, but still useful. If robot Ramanujan gives us answers with no mortal-understandable justification, but it's always right, that still gives decades or centuries of topics to try to build theory around, with the motivational benefit that you always know that what you're working on can be solved. Simply treat it as an oracle that dispenses magical opaque proof certificates.
I don't think that's the argument. In my opinion this is like paying to unlock characters, à la EA. Who's going to feel a sense of accomplishment by just trying to interpret what an LLM spat out? Sure,maybe the results will be used by someone in some field, the same way a product manager uses what the development team developed. Is the PM going to give talks about it? Are they going to expand on those developments and come up with something new?
> Who's going to feel a sense of accomplishment by just trying to interpret what an LLM spat out?
I think you have a point, but this is the reality we have to face. The genie is out of the bottle. Even if OpenAI stops publishing AI-generated proofs, it's only a matter of months before tools with similar capabilities are in everyone's hands.
