"I crossed an interesting threshold yesterday, which I think many other mathematicians have been crossing recently as well. In the middle of trying to prove a result, I identified a statement that looked true and that would, if true, be useful to me.
"Instead of trying to prove it, I asked GPT5 about it, and in about 20 seconds received a proof. The proof relied on a lemma that I had not heard of (the statement was a bit outside my main areas), so although I am confident I'd have got there in the end.
"the time it would have taken me would probably have been of order of magnitude an hour (an estimate that comes with quite wide error bars). So it looks as though we have entered the brief but enjoyable era where our research is greatly sped up by AI but AI still needs us.
"PS In case anyone's worried that it used a lemma I hadn't heard of, I checked that the lemma was not a hallucination."
kenjackson•1w ago
WhyOhWhyQ•1w ago
johnisgood•1w ago
WhyOhWhyQ•1w ago
estimator7292•1w ago
auggierose•3h ago
siva7•3h ago
squigz•3h ago
muldvarp•3h ago
It also significantly changes my current job to something I didn't sign up to.
mettamage•3h ago
Or at least my school system tried to (Netherlands).
This didn’t fully come out of the blue. We have been told to expect the unexpected.
muldvarp•19m ago
It absolutely did. Five years ago people would have told you that white collar jobs where mostly un-automatable and software engineering was especially safe due to the complexity.
Alex2037•3h ago
muldvarp•16m ago
I'm not complaining to stop this. I'm sure it won't be stopped. I'm explaining why some people who work for a living don't like this technology.
I'm honestly not sure why others do. It pretty much doesn't matter what work you do for a living. If this technology can replace a non-negligible part of the white collar workforce it will have negative consequences for you. You don't have to like that just because you can't stop it.
lacker•50m ago
To me it's like a halfway step toward management. When you start being a manager, you also start writing less code and having a lot more conversations.
iwontberude•40m ago
muldvarp•23m ago
I didn't want to get into management, because it's boring. Now I got forced into management and don't even get paid more.
deaux•3m ago
That's certainly not the reason most HNers are giving - I'm seeing far more claims that LLMs are entirely meaningless becauzs either "they cannot make something they haven't seen before" or "half the time they hallucinate". The latter even appears as one of the first replies in this post's link, the X thread!
truculent•3h ago
> _brief_ but enjoyable era