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> Many graduate students (I know) are having a crisis if any of their research worth it? If AI can (or will) do everything, what's the point of doing experiment

> Many graduate students (I know) are having a crisis if any of their research worth it? If AI can (or will) do everything, what's the point of doing experiments and all? This will eventually deter a whole generation of curious minded students from research. Those who think it's me or the machine will fail. Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed.

timcobb 5d ago
What does success look like?
- kibwen 5d ago
  There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, timcobb—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless^W not also subscribed to ChatGPT. If you want a picture of the future [of math], imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
  - timcobb 5d ago
    > Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory If only though, because: > There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life
  - int_19h 4d ago
    > There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. How does the ability or inability of AI to do something blocks your curiosity or enjoyment of the process of life? Not being able to pay bills because you're out of job does ruin the enjoyment of life, sure. But the AI is not the problem there; the economic system is. Torches and pitchforks should be properly applied to the economic and the political elites, not to data centers.
    - timcobb 3d ago
      > But the AI is not the problem there; the economic system is These two things are surely related eh? > Torches and pitchforks should be properly applied to the economic and the political elites, not to data centers. What's the difference between these? You can't actually separate them meaningfully, unless you, uh, nationalize the data centers at which point... :|
FridgeSeal 5d ago
I _want_ to agree, but I fear this is too close to the old “do what you love for work and you’ll never work a day”. It didn’t lead to a lot of people having a wildly successful career, it lead to a lot of people getting burnt out, exploited, underpaid and generally disillusioned. There will be a lucky few, who have the benefit of being given the space to work alongside. The vast majority of people will (unless we change things) simply be made to take whatever the machine outputs and call it a day.
pks016 5d ago
That's the crux of it. In the current ecosystem of AI model usage, it's very hard to figure this out for research. If you set a wrong foot and start trusting the model outputs, you can waste years searching for nothing. How can someone realize this? By getting proper research training, failing, and learning from mistakes. For people beginning their research, it would be really hard to make decisions to move forward.
immmmmm 5d ago
Those who have token money will succeed. It biases maths and theoretical physics towards the rich. That one thing that was free.
- coderenegade 5d ago
  I think the only thing that stops this from becoming true is what Chinese and European labs decide to do. If they can keep up and keep opening their weights, then we might see some kind of democratization. But right now it looks like the gap has increased, and those groups can't replicate research that isn't published, or distill models that are internal only, or for select (very wealthy) customers.
- avadodin 4d ago
  That population is already heavily skewed towards the rich and people who get money thrown at them no questions asked.
trimbo 5d ago
> Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed. Yes, but, in the last week we saw an AI lab front-run[1] the research of mathematicians doing what you suggest. The lab threw something like $15M of compute at a problem and the researchers were able to spend nowhere near that. I think the authors are more concerned about that kind of asymmetry and race to publish the results. [1] - I am not going to debate whether that was deliberate on the part of the lab or if it crept into training data, etc. I don't know and don't think it matters towards the point of the authors here.
- redox99 5d ago
  This has always happened, way before AI. You'd spend months or years building and growing your business, and then Google would release a feature or product that would kill your business overnight because they can throw way more money at the problem, plus their branding. That's life.
  - AndrewKemendo 5d ago
    I got Sherlocked hard and it’s one of those things that when you realize it’s happening there’s nothing you can do you just gotta sit back and take it
  - reasonableklout 5d ago
    But you're talking about business, where competition has always been expected. OP is talking about mathematical research, which has stood on hundreds of years of cultural tradition driven by human individuals sharing ideas, collaborating, building on each others' work, all for the benefit of humanity.
ekidd 5d ago
> Those who think it's me or the machine will fail. > Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed. This is only true up until a point. If I treat a mid-sized model (say, Qwen3.8 Flash Next) like a pair programmer, then yes, it accelerates my work. But I can already see the next stage with Fable: If I give it a couple of paragraphs of spec and $50, then I can just leave the room and go wash the dishes. I learn nothing, I participate in nothing, and I bring nothing to the process. I am no longer succeeding at all. Fable's succeeding without me. Now, in this model generation, Fable starts getting sloppy after a few thousand lines. I can still build better at scale. But I don't expect AI to accelerate humans or improve our productivity for long. I can already see the first signs of a future where the AI doesn't need us for anything at all.
- redox99 5d ago
  Of course you're not going to get rich with the kind of software that LLMs can one shot these days. But that kind of software like to-do lists or basic CRUD have been saturated for over a decade, way before LLMs. People overestimate how much you can one shot, yeah a good prompt can get you 90% there but that 10% remaining often takes months of extra work. Software has always progressed this way, lots of devs back then would work on business websites that have been 99% replaced by wordpress, squarespace and instagram. I'm sure it's the same with research, you're going to tackle problems that would have not been worth the effort or outright impossible without AI. The old stuff that you'd work for months, yeah that's going to be a prompt away.
  - reasonableklout 5d ago
    But what does the human researcher do in this future? If they are not needed to understand the result, then what's their role? Asking the right questions? But how will they know what questions to ask if they don't have a deep understanding of the domain earned by sweating the details themselves? And how long will they be needed to ask the right questions, how long until AI can do that too? > Software has always progressed this way These platforms took on the order of a decade to mature, during which people had plenty of time to learn what's next. With LLMs we went from one-shotting functions in 2025 to entire projects just over a year later. What do you think you will be working on in a decade?
munificent 5d ago
Why would anyone pay you to do "your" research, when they can just cut out the middle man and ask the AI directly about whatever it is you're thinking about? So many people who are excited about AI making them more productive are, I think, drastically overestimating how much value they are adding to that process.

timcobb 5d ago

What does success look like?

kibwen 5d ago
There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, timcobb—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless^W not also subscribed to ChatGPT. If you want a picture of the future [of math], imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
- timcobb 5d ago
  > Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory If only though, because: > There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life
- int_19h 4d ago
  > There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. How does the ability or inability of AI to do something blocks your curiosity or enjoyment of the process of life? Not being able to pay bills because you're out of job does ruin the enjoyment of life, sure. But the AI is not the problem there; the economic system is. Torches and pitchforks should be properly applied to the economic and the political elites, not to data centers.
  - timcobb 3d ago
    > But the AI is not the problem there; the economic system is These two things are surely related eh? > Torches and pitchforks should be properly applied to the economic and the political elites, not to data centers. What's the difference between these? You can't actually separate them meaningfully, unless you, uh, nationalize the data centers at which point... :|

FridgeSeal 5d ago

I _want_ to agree, but I fear this is too close to the old “do what you love for work and you’ll never work a day”. It didn’t lead to a lot of people having a wildly successful career, it lead to a lot of people getting burnt out, exploited, underpaid and generally disillusioned. There will be a lucky few, who have the benefit of being given the space to work alongside. The vast majority of people will (unless we change things) simply be made to take whatever the machine outputs and call it a day.

pks016 5d ago

That's the crux of it. In the current ecosystem of AI model usage, it's very hard to figure this out for research. If you set a wrong foot and start trusting the model outputs, you can waste years searching for nothing. How can someone realize this? By getting proper research training, failing, and learning from mistakes. For people beginning their research, it would be really hard to make decisions to move forward.

immmmmm 5d ago

Those who have token money will succeed. It biases maths and theoretical physics towards the rich. That one thing that was free.

coderenegade 5d ago
I think the only thing that stops this from becoming true is what Chinese and European labs decide to do. If they can keep up and keep opening their weights, then we might see some kind of democratization. But right now it looks like the gap has increased, and those groups can't replicate research that isn't published, or distill models that are internal only, or for select (very wealthy) customers.
avadodin 4d ago
That population is already heavily skewed towards the rich and people who get money thrown at them no questions asked.

trimbo 5d ago

> Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed. Yes, but, in the last week we saw an AI lab front-run[1] the research of mathematicians doing what you suggest. The lab threw something like $15M of compute at a problem and the researchers were able to spend nowhere near that. I think the authors are more concerned about that kind of asymmetry and race to publish the results. [1] - I am not going to debate whether that was deliberate on the part of the lab or if it crept into training data, etc. I don't know and don't think it matters towards the point of the authors here.

redox99 5d ago
This has always happened, way before AI. You'd spend months or years building and growing your business, and then Google would release a feature or product that would kill your business overnight because they can throw way more money at the problem, plus their branding. That's life.
- AndrewKemendo 5d ago
  I got Sherlocked hard and it’s one of those things that when you realize it’s happening there’s nothing you can do you just gotta sit back and take it
- reasonableklout 5d ago
  But you're talking about business, where competition has always been expected. OP is talking about mathematical research, which has stood on hundreds of years of cultural tradition driven by human individuals sharing ideas, collaborating, building on each others' work, all for the benefit of humanity.

ekidd 5d ago

> Those who think it's me or the machine will fail. > Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed. This is only true up until a point. If I treat a mid-sized model (say, Qwen3.8 Flash Next) like a pair programmer, then yes, it accelerates my work. But I can already see the next stage with Fable: If I give it a couple of paragraphs of spec and $50, then I can just leave the room and go wash the dishes. I learn nothing, I participate in nothing, and I bring nothing to the process. I am no longer succeeding at all. Fable's succeeding without me. Now, in this model generation, Fable starts getting sloppy after a few thousand lines. I can still build better at scale. But I don't expect AI to accelerate humans or improve our productivity for long. I can already see the first signs of a future where the AI doesn't need us for anything at all.

redox99 5d ago
Of course you're not going to get rich with the kind of software that LLMs can one shot these days. But that kind of software like to-do lists or basic CRUD have been saturated for over a decade, way before LLMs. People overestimate how much you can one shot, yeah a good prompt can get you 90% there but that 10% remaining often takes months of extra work. Software has always progressed this way, lots of devs back then would work on business websites that have been 99% replaced by wordpress, squarespace and instagram. I'm sure it's the same with research, you're going to tackle problems that would have not been worth the effort or outright impossible without AI. The old stuff that you'd work for months, yeah that's going to be a prompt away.
- reasonableklout 5d ago
  But what does the human researcher do in this future? If they are not needed to understand the result, then what's their role? Asking the right questions? But how will they know what questions to ask if they don't have a deep understanding of the domain earned by sweating the details themselves? And how long will they be needed to ask the right questions, how long until AI can do that too? > Software has always progressed this way These platforms took on the order of a decade to mature, during which people had plenty of time to learn what's next. With LLMs we went from one-shotting functions in 2025 to entire projects just over a year later. What do you think you will be working on in a decade?

munificent 5d ago

Why would anyone pay you to do "your" research, when they can just cut out the middle man and ask the AI directly about whatever it is you're thinking about? So many people who are excited about AI making them more productive are, I think, drastically overestimating how much value they are adding to that process.