The Mathocalypse

As a side note, you can tell this wasn't written by an AI by the first sentence:

> mommy, I heard you got cooked! I heard that a robot solved the math problem you worked on for your whole career! OOF!

My 8yo talks exactly like that. I could totally imagine him saying this, the same way, at the dining room table.

I asked ChatGPT "pretend you're an 8/9 year old today. how would you insult your mom about having her job be replaced by an AI?", and the responses it offered were:

> “Mom, AI took your job because apparently even robots were like, ‘Yeah… we can do this better.’”

> “Mom, congratulations! You got replaced by a computer. Even Siri has a job now and you don’t!”

> “Mom, AI took your job? Dang. I guess even a robot looked at your work and said, ‘I got this.’”

> “Don’t worry, Mom. You can still be useful… like teaching the AI how to make my lunch.”

All of these seem to have a vaguely Millennial flavor, aside from being pretty awkward and mechanical roasts. Trust the children and linguistic drift to be the best AI detector.

The irony. Something that is born out of a science, eats up that science.

What's with all the "AI just proved that this or that isn't O(n (log (n))^2) but akshually O(n (log (n))^1.99999)"??

I guess it deserves respect as progress, but it just rubs me the wrong way. Like the machine did the absolute minimum to beat the previous mark.

I liked the metaphor of a climber teleported to the top of a fog shrouded mountain. And I agree that now that the teleporter exists, we need to use it to reach more peaks and explore. There's no going back to a world where AI doesn't exist.

Agents basically did statistically guided brutforcing. There is no value in what they produced because it lead to no understanding of anything and most likely will hurt the field IMO

Quoting DCKP <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49989738>:

>I have had this conversation with my PhD students yesterday. I am 100% sure that all of their problems can be solved by publicly-available models now (I solved a case of one myself as a test, it took 15 minutes). So the challenge for them is to see how much they can accomplish in their allotted period, and still pass a defence on at the end of it all. The PhD defence is going to become all about a test of understanding, not a test of quantity of publication.

Also, Ted Chiang's 2000 short story "Catching crumbs from the table" <https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1wzu5gf/this_m...>.

C'mon. Mathpocalypse. Things are hard enough already.