University of Toronto mathematician Daniel Litt on how AI has changed academic mathematics' reward incentives, and how easily he proved it: "The goal of mathematics is not to produce mathematics papers. It's to produce some kind of understanding." "Maybe some of that understanding resides in model weights or something. To me, that's pretty unsatisfying." "My motivation for doing mathematics is that I would like to satisfy my own personal curiosity, and I think people should have the capability to do that. That requires a pretty substantial apparatus." "Right now, if you're a post-doc on the market... the best way to get a job is to produce a lot of papers which maybe prove old conjectures. And you can do that by playing the slot machine until the model produces a hopefully correct proof." "You don't even have to pick the theorem in advance." "Here's an experiment you can do. You can take Codex, you can say, 'Go online, find five recent conjectures in algebraic geometry and prove them.' I've run this experiment, and with some back and forth I was able to in an hour get like three quite bad papers. But correct papers." @littmath @lishali88