Agree. Additionally, it’s really disheartening that people do this with Erdos problems specifically. They are not major research questions in mathematics, but were intended as little conjectures that people could use as a way into serious number theory with a small cash reward and a little bit of minor fame for being the person who did the work to solve one of them. They are not things where the solution itself provides an amazing amount of insight or moves the frontier of mathematics forward particularly.
So what is happening now is people now are nuking and paving the whole space with AI to prove their model can do maths, and we are all poorer for having this nice thing ruined in this way.
Number theorist Jared Lichtman says this AI proof is from "The Book", the highest compliment one can give. He also says:
> I care deeply about this problem, and I've been thinking about it for the past 7 years. I'd frequently talk to Maynard about it in our meetings, and consulted over the years with several experts (Granville, Pomerance, Sound, Fox...) and others at Oxford and Stanford. This problem was not a question of low-visibility per-se. Rather, it seems like a proof which becomes strikingly compact post-hoc, but the construction is quite special among many similar variations.
Terence Tao says:
> In any case, I would indeed say that this is a situation in which the AI-generated paper inadvertently highlighted a tighter connection between two areas of mathematics (in this case, the anatomy of integers and the theory of Markov processes) than had previously been made explicit in the literature (though there were hints and precursors scattered therein which one can see in retrospect). That would be a meaningful contribution to the anatomy of integers that goes well beyond the solution of this particular Erdos problem.
So what is happening now is people now are nuking and paving the whole space with AI to prove their model can do maths, and we are all poorer for having this nice thing ruined in this way.
> I care deeply about this problem, and I've been thinking about it for the past 7 years. I'd frequently talk to Maynard about it in our meetings, and consulted over the years with several experts (Granville, Pomerance, Sound, Fox...) and others at Oxford and Stanford. This problem was not a question of low-visibility per-se. Rather, it seems like a proof which becomes strikingly compact post-hoc, but the construction is quite special among many similar variations.
Terence Tao says:
> In any case, I would indeed say that this is a situation in which the AI-generated paper inadvertently highlighted a tighter connection between two areas of mathematics (in this case, the anatomy of integers and the theory of Markov processes) than had previously been made explicit in the literature (though there were hints and precursors scattered therein which one can see in retrospect). That would be a meaningful contribution to the anatomy of integers that goes well beyond the solution of this particular Erdos problem.
https://www.math.inc/
That AI startup also partners with Terence Tao:
https://www.math.inc/veritas-fellowships
https://www.math.inc/a-conversation-with-terry-tao
These two AI "enthusiasts" have massive conflicts of interest, which should perhaps be investigated by an ethics commission.