I know why Mathematicians weep

Re:I know why Mathematicians weep by nsagent on Thursday October 15, 2026 @10:45AM (#50104420)

I remember the same doom cycle during my PhD when GPT 4 came out [1,2]. It seemed like everyone in NLP was freaking out except me. A few years later and new CS PhDs are still graduating and joining academia and industry. Much ado about nothing.

Considering I currently live in Ithaca and have a friend doing a Math PhD, so I've heard from him some of the discussions in the department. I think the biggest shock for people is that individuals spent significant portions of their time on some of the problems that OpenAI supposedly solved (I say supposedly because all of the proofs have yet to be independently vetted). I understand that it's a shock, but I'm confident that in time it will be no more of a blip than it was for NLP.

[1]: https://xxcancel.com/mayhewsw/status/1636476184098643968

[2]: https://xxcancel.com/andriy_mulyar/status/163613925780582809...

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Re:I know why Mathematicians weep by famouswaffles on Thursday October 15, 2026 @11:36AM (#50105226)

A blip for NLP? What bespoke NLP research is about anything other than LLMs these days? How many companies are handcrafting bespoke NLP models instead of sending a LLM request? Really confused here.

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Re:I know why Mathematicians weep by bjornsing on Thursday October 15, 2026 @11:15AM (#50104903)

I’m not sure I’m following… because as I understand it NLP is basically solved now (with transformer LLMs). No?

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