I saw it coming since reading Kurzweil in high school and it's still heavy.

I just had a chance to flinch first.

It was really quick. I stumbled across a comment from KConrad on MathOverflow on how useless AI was for research. That comment was from 2024. When it disproved the unit distance conjecture in May, the solution involved a breath of knowledge of the literature that it made sense it took a computer to make the connection. It only took 5 months for it to advance to the point that it was better than humans at almost everything. Even if you expected it, the mind boggles at how fast it was.

Also, it's impossible to really know how you're going to react to something until it happens to you. When ChatGPT came out, I already thought "in the long run they're going to automate almost everything humans love to do". Despite having 4 years to brood about it, I did not really know what it would feel like until it happened to me directly.

There was an interesting passage in the article:

> Today, the mathematicians are weeping, because the machine smashed their tower first. But tomorrow, it may be the physicists, the economists, the illustrators, or the writers who weep over their fallen blocks.

Isn't it extraordinary that these models still can't write well? I mean, they write passably well, but they all have a highly characteristic style that you can spot from a mile away. These language models can crack the toughest open problems in math, but they haven't yet cracked human-like writing, especially long-form writing, without exposing themselves. This is very very odd, IMO.

I think the point in that in the "age of AI" virtually nobody will have the opportunity to follow a career and produce works like Strogatz was able to do.