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Re:“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more ... by j-pb on Thursday October 08, 2026 @03:49AM (#50002972)

  The authors of the proof are invited to give many talks, and meet with other experts in the area.  Workshops are set up to discuss the proof, as well as other recent developments.

  problems are being solved autonomously by AI prompters who have no interest in the broader field itself once their initial target is "solved", and do not understand the AI output well enough to answer questions on the result
The value here seems to be the insights that the author of the proof gained, and the paths they took and maybe more importantly didn't take. Inviting only the human prompter to a talk on the paper is like inviting only the department chair, manager of the actual author.

The valuable part that Tao is feeling the absence of is the insight, and you can only get that from talking to the swarm of agents that developed the original proof with all of their context.

So to me it feels like we don't need Math 2.0, but Authorship 2.0. I want to "meet" the context that generated these proofs. I mean luckily these were not generated by faceless systems like a SAT solver, you can actually talk to it, but I'm not sure if we can step beyond our pride and grant the true authors of these proofs that recognition.

Re:“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more ... by pegasus on Thursday October 08, 2026 @04:27AM (#50003228)
These systems don't have a genuine capacity of introspection, beyond just mining the conversation trace. When you're asking them why they did this or that, they are basically guessing anew from the outside, and are just as likely to hallucinate as they are to hit the right answer. These are mechanical systems which brute-force chains of various (re)combinations of techniques acquired from the training data. The true authors are all those who have contributed those techniques in the past.
Re:“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more ... by dannyw on Thursday October 08, 2026 @08:10AM (#50004858)
I think that's debatable. Anthropic's interpretability research suggest models do have self-introspection ability, at least in the "J-Space": https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/ ; and this private working/'introspection' space is distinct and distinguishable from the tokens they output (CoT tokens are output too).
Re:“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more ... by JacobAsmuth on Thursday October 08, 2026 @03:35PM (#50010897)
Bold claim. What data is informing it?
Re:“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more ... by a3w on Thursday October 08, 2026 @04:51AM (#50003414)
This was how it was done in chemistry back in the day: release a cooking instruction. If it fails, visit the colleagues and give hints on what you meant.

The idea would be that you should not fiddle with the minds who try to independently evaluate your works, so that is not a feasible approach to truth seeking.

While in organic chemistry, this way, valid progress was made, you can always avoid a perpetuum mobile inventor and get conned.

Re:“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more ... by scotty79 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @07:46AM (#50004680)
> problems are being solved autonomously by AI prompters who have no interest in the broader field itself once their initial target is "solved"

This is pretty much what a person that proivded patronage to a matematician used to be. API prompters are people who provide patronage for AI mathematicians.

You don't talk with them about the discoveries. About discoveries you should talk with who actually made them. Namely the LLMs.

Another analogy might by that you shouldn't expect to have interesting discussion about the essence of art with art producer.

Just thank them for the inference they covered and interact with the results instead.

Re:“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more ... by cubefox on Thursday October 08, 2026 @08:32AM (#50005053)
The problem is that the reasoning traces are kept secret. OpenAI doesn't publish them because it would lead to distillation attacks from other AI companies.
Re:“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more ... by drichel on Thursday October 08, 2026 @08:40AM (#50005138)
The reasoning traces were traditionally keept secret by legacy mathematicians as well.

"When the architect completes a fine building, he removes the scaffolding." - Carl Friedrich Gauss

Re:“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more ... by jobs_throwaway on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:13PM (#50007663)
I don't believe legacy mathematicians kept their reasoning secret after they published. Quite the opposite—they were giving talks and lectures, responding to criticisms, and generally convincing the community that they were right. OpenAI has done none of that.
Re:“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more ... by cubefox on Thursday October 08, 2026 @09:09AM (#50005403)
Legacy mathematicians can nontheless remember much of how they came up with their proof. Even though they (as Gauss says) usually don't publish this, they can still answer questions about it at conferences and workshops, or otherwise use the knowledge of the creation process to explain their proof. It's not a secret in the sense of OpenAI.
Re:“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more ... by casey2 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @10:49PM (#50015395)
Nobody understand the talks at these conferences unless they are really dumbed-down (which they should be). The value is talking to other mathematicians not the speaker.