This REALLY reminds me of how jealously cells guard their genomic DNA from interaction with nucleic acids out in the environment.

Most genetic information on Earth is malicious information, selfish replicators in the form of viruses or transposable elements or selfish elements. Things that subvert the signals within a cell for their own propagation and provide nothing productive that the cells care about. So cells jealously guard their own genomic DNA and have all kinds of checks to make sure that nothing other than that sequence gets used, and outside sequence does not get incorporated into it. ANY DNA in your cytplasm gets rapidly destroyed, double stranded RNA sets off your immune system like crazy, even RNA with sequence statistics that are not quite like that of your species can set off an inflammatory reaction, immune system cells seeing RNA inside them that is overly compact and optimized like viral RNA treat them as sources of antigen rather than self.

I cannot help but think we are living through the transformation of our non-brain-information sphere into a state like that of the genetic information sphere. Most material out there being meaningless for our purposes and us needing to jealously guard the provenance of information we use so as to not use bull, or worse, huge amounts of malicious information made to subvert us to the purposes of the powers that be that generate it.

Evolution makes parasites more reliably than anything else. How did we train text-generation systems? Basically, to mimic the written word on the page like a stick bug on a stick. They're like those beetles that live in ant colonies, sending out social signals that make the ants see them as offspring that have to be babied rather than parasites that don't contribute. They replicate the form while not being the thing that they have subverted the signals of being.

I believe this is happening with software, but at least there are objective consequences for screwing up there (guy gets his home directory deleted, email is sent on a guy's behalf without permission, small business gets every customer subscription cancelled). But nothing bad happens if there is a mathematical mistake in a paper and nobody catches it. One could say to just provide a Lean proof, but there is still the issue of making sure the Lean code actually matches the content of the paper. Exactly what force will correct things?

Still, I don't think this is the most likely possibility. The AI companies are extremely unsustainable financially, and it's not like they're very popular. Once they collapse, I believe there will be a re-evaluation of how LLMs should be used in research. If they are used (let alone trained), someone is going to have to pay the bills.

In the end, we have to ask ourselves the question of why one does math. To me, math is not really a field where you memorize trivia. The real value comes from being able to think abstractly and rigorously from first principles, and from understanding why something is true rather than just knowing it is true. It is another aspect of your ability to reason as a free human. A few dedicated people go into math research, but your skills can easily go to many places. If you're starting undergrad, you have plenty of time to see how this all pans out before making a decision.

https://math.andrej.com/2013/08/19/how-to-review-formalized-mathematics/

The AI people's cry of "no don't look at the code! it's in lean so it's correct! does give me a bit of hope (hi bitofhope if you're here) that it's bullshit that will fall over

For what it's worth, after the last of these big announcements, I decided to try one of these AIs on one of my small problems that I couldn't figure out. The AI did give a solution. That is, until I checked it thoroughly and realized that the it had a subtle but severe mistake that made it useless. I reprompted it, it failed again, and I ran out of tokens. I'm sure someone will tell me to shell out $200/mo for a pro subscription.

In the math and computer science research community, this is all anyone can really talk about right now. Honestly, after watching this whole AI bubble starting from the very beginning, I think the AI companies want to use marketing to stoke fear that all mathematicians will be replaced. But now, I am just too tired to argue. The amount of alarm and the extraordinary social pressure to use LLMs has soured me to this whole research thing. If becoming a researcher will one day require supporting these evil AI companies, I would rather just not. My dream job now is Factorio developer.

A lot of annoying people in technical areas view the world in terms of an intelligence hierarchy: the smartest people do math and physics, the slightly less smart people do coding, and the dumb people do everything else. So if AI can do math then it can do anything else. But, as an example, it is abundantly obvious now that AI is not replacing filmmaking. The techbros might be moved by arguments about how hilariously expensive video generation is, and how all these videos are 2 second clips stitched together so you won't feel the uncanny valley. But the real reason is that nobody wants to watch slop made with no intention or feeling. Also, nobody wants to support the AI companies, which could not act more evil even if they tried.

The mania in math right now quite resembles the mania in software engineering back in December-February, when Claude Code definitely solved all coding. I don't think the boosters expected that by April, everyone would be complaining about how expensive it all was while seeing an endless parade of vibe coding disasters (and no increase in productivity). Even if math research works out perfectly well (which is a still big if), it's not going to pay the bills. They would need to find a use case in the real world, where hallucinations can cause serious damage and cannot be formally prevented. And they have certainly tried. Math will not change the fact that all of this will collapse.
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