Who cares about them? I want Tao to stop proving all the interesting problems I was planning to work on.

Gauss and Euler, and also Ramanujan (results without proofs, which is a bit like unreadable Lean) did that for their lifetimes.

Yes, and they are revered as geniuses, which makes it clear that this is all sour grapes. And surely if people died, went to heaven, and were able to talk with God whenever they wanted, they wouldn't be upset that now they could know the answer to any mystery whenever they'd like; they'd appreciate that now they have someone to guide them! Or were they similarly upset when lecturers handed them already completed theory in school? There's already enough developed theory that people don't have the time to learn it all as it is.

Not exactly, because we would have cool people to inspire us and hang out with us.

But your argument is nonsensical because even if Gauss and von Neumann appeared, they wouldn't go into random fields and just prove things mechanically. They'd have to attend seminars, teach others, collaborate with others, and generally inspire others with their brilliance. It's the precise lack of this activity that makes AI in math so reprehensible.

Your argument encapsulates a contradiction because human mathematicians wouldn't be dropping proofs arbitrarily like AI is doing. They would do something completely different. Even the best of them.

Gauss was generally quite secretive and Ramanujan would famously tell people answers that he had received from divine inspiration, often with no ability to articulate how he knew. Von Neumann did just go into random fields and revolutionize them. If the three of them did come back from the dead and form a little powerhouse group that barely collaborated with the outside and just started publishing results for everyone else to try to keep up with, they'd no doubt still be considered geniuses.

Give it six months and models might be able to explain things better than any human. They can already collaborate perfectly well if you ask them to. e.g. there was a post here a couple months ago where Tao shared his ChatGPT logs[0].

If you're not inspired by the ability to talk to a superintelligent machine, and can't find what you'd want to know, that's a you problem.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010345

> Give it six months

Ah, the "six months till AGI" meme, but unironically :)

Also, before citing Terence Tao on LLMs maybe you should read what he has to say about it...

It's been doing all of the actual coding part of my job for the better part of a year, and you're commenting on a post about how it just released another round of math breakthroughs, besting a bunch of top humans. It can search the web and analyze documents it finds for me. It can do reverse engineering. It can analyze and create images.

Not sure what your definition of AGI is, but it clearly has superhuman performance on most knowledge work already. Do you think after already having demonstrated that it can solve top problems, that the final frontier it won't be able to cross is explaining its solutions to the experts that were researching those problems, and eventually to e.g. grad student or postdoc level practitioners as a lecture course/set of notes?

> It's been doing all of the actual coding part of my job for the better part of a year,

Makes me think of the Upton Sinclair quote:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Not sure I follow: if it weren't incredibly useful, my salary wouldn't depend on it since it wouldn't be doing my work for me, innit? So if I am dependent on it, that's just agreeing that it's now replaced programming per se as a professional activity. That quote applies to the people selling the tool (not me), not the people who it will replace (me), and in the meantime who are buying/using it.

I think the point is that people (software engineers included), will be biased to believe AI won’t replace them because believing otherwise would cost them their job (and therefore salary).

I’m not taking a side on that debate, just clarifying the relevancy of that quote.

"Can do the coding part of my job" is your definition of "almost AGI"?

I don't know a single taxi driver who 5 years ago would have claimed "my car can now park itself, FSD must be barely 6 months away".

No, but when Waymos were able to do the driving part, they probably should've seen the writing on the wall.

Isn't it curious that while LLMs are apparently on the precipice of "AGI" and possessing superhuman capabilities for knowledge work, the frontier labs are still hiring armies of humans as "Account Associates", "Account Directors", "AI Support Engineers", and "Applied AI Engineers" (https://openai.com/careers/search/). Since those roles are much more pedestrian than top math problems, one might expect the frontier labs to be at the forefront of automating those jobs using their world-beating models. Wouldn't that be a more direct flex of their economic value?