There's no good guys in this situation. The Byzantine Empire spent 1000 years doing the same kind of shit to other people. The little people, of course, suffered tremendously for it.
Claude A) reads the documentation and B) needs the documentation C) can write the documentation quickly. None of which is true for your and your coworkers, at least not consistently.
I've been spending 3 weeks, as a non mathemetician, chasing down a particular, very simply-stated, but secretly quite complex problem, and AI has been _so incredibly helpful_, not just in making progress on it, and doing obvious stuff like formalizing in lean, doing literature searches, reading through 10 or 15 papers and summarizing the results for me and how they apply to what I'm doing, giving me enough of an introduction to _entire fields_, that I can talk intelligently about it (I've had email correspondence with a couple of professional mathematicians in a few different fields about it, who agreed that it's an interesting, simple, but difficult problem). I've gone from "this should be easy", to "okay, I've almost got a proof", to "this is impossible", to literally just nailing down a few remaining sub-cases out of an infinite family.
I don't want to call anyone out, but I emailed one fairly famous mathemetician, and he literally said: "This is very interesting, I thought about it for a while, couldn't figure it out, but I thought ChatGPT had an interesting response..." and he linked me to his chatgpt transcript... (which, was actually helpful, because he asked it a better question than I was asking).
I have a suspicion that math will quite soon be exactly like programming and fall to the same machinery that coding is.
One thing that I noticed is that a common workflow I had was isolating hard subquestions in a self contained way and then "surveying" multiple different LLMs in a totally clean context. They would often say: "Oh, this is a obvious example of such-and-such" and immediately clear the barrier.
I'd be very cautious about "AI psychosis" here, or at the very least becoming a "crank". I've read too many stories of people convincing themselves they're on the verge of some great discovery to not hear "3 weeks to become conversational in mathematical fields" and not see all kinds of red flags.
I studied math at MIT and have several friends who are professors now and they deal with cranks all the time and since they're very kind and conflict averse people they tend to respond with perfunctory emails when they get inbounds like that.
So just be wary. Your external validation may not be as strong as you think it is, though kudos to you for at least trying to step out of the AI vortex to attempt to ground yourself.
> I'd be very cautious about "AI psychosis" here, or at the very least becoming a "crank". I've read too many stories of people convincing themselves they're on the verge of some great discovery to not hear "3 weeks to become conversational in mathematical fields" and not see all kinds of red flags.
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it's not a great discovery, it's a pretty minor question, that I thought would be easy and it's not -- i've just been poking off and on at it for weeks, and I'm relying on lean to verify everything. It's actually a quite specific CS-adjacent problem that I came up with trying to write code, that just is hard to solve, and nobody in the literature that I could find has looked at directly. The end result of it will have exactly zero consequences other than proving an interesting lower bound for a question that as far as i can tell, nobody has bothered even looking at but me. The reason it touches on multiple fields is that it's sort of both an algebra problem and a CS problem, so i keep having to flip between them to understand what I'm looking at, and there are a lot of sub-fields that span both that have different tools, and it took me a while to find the right one.
Having been in academia for a bit, I find it somewhat hard to believe multiple professional mathematicians in different fields give meaningful reply to a random email solicitation from an internet stranger within three weeks, simply because those people's inboxes are absolutely bombarded every minute.
In reality people would be thrilled to have such response even with a finished preprint on arXiv. Anyway if you really hit the jackpot hope it will be smooth working out the details and get it published!
Well, I was emailing specific people who were working on very closely related things, and had recently published papers about it and I had very small, concrete questions about their results and not much about my question, except for context.
Claude once said to me: "After six months we have made no progress on this and I think we should reconsider another option" and I was like my dude we have been at this for only 2 hours.
I like this anecdote because it gets at how words to an LLM have no connection to their real concepts. To an LLM, words are simply numbers arranged in a likely pattern.
Of course for humans words have no inherent meaning either, they're just sequences of characters or patterns of sounds. It is what words are associated with that carries meaning. A large part of this is how words relate to other words. LLMs can capture this in principle. What LLMs lack is the direct association of a word with sensory experience. But it's an open question how relevant this is in practice to understanding.
Fair point. Humans experience reality and use words to reflect that. LLMs only have the words. And it's an open question how much of a limitation that is to understanding.
The same thing can be noticed in dreams. I once heard advice to try to re-read what you see in a dream. So I was dreaming and in a dream I read a phrase about something and there was a name of a city there. I managed to remember that advice and re-read the phrase. It felt exactly same, but the city name was different.
(LLMs carry other numerous similarities to dreams or to certain psychiatric disorders. So there is indeed a mechanism in our brains that is similar to how they work. But it is not the only thing there and on its own it won't "evolve" into consciousness. Even if we believe consciousness evolved somehow, it would be hard to imagine it started as a delirious state and then somehow ceased to be delirious.)
I think probably the correct spend is something closer to 10x that if people can figure agent coordination problems out. It's not even really about capability at this point, it's about keeping track of what agents are doing.
A very, very long time ago, at my first job, the people who used anything other than C were considered 'fake' developers and were resentful that everything was shifting away from C for most things. I felt that :)
> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people?
I think this is directionally right, but I think there might be a scaling/organization problem for companies, and that the more likely outcome is that _small companies_ are going to start punching way over their weight class.
I suspect the opposite. Products don't win because they are better. They win because monopolies control the sales/regulators. Bit occasionally the big companies fucked up the actual product development so badly an upstart could emerge. With ai they will quickly just copy any success and all the other big orgs will just buy the AI ripoff version.
I was working with opus 4.7 on a math formalization problem for several days and 4.8 one-shotted the proof from a clean description as soon as the update came through. I was very surprised.
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