Ask HN: New way of organizing Mathematical Research
After all of the recent announcements of AI assisted proofs and the reaction of the mathematical community, it is clear the we need new ways of organizing mathematical research.
The current paradigm of submitting a paper to arxiv, and waiting for the review of the community will not scale with AI research. There is a probable outcome where mathematical statements are so easy to proof (compared to some years ago) that arxiv will be floded with AI slop explanations and their associated lean code. It will then be very difficult to find "classical" mathematical proofs.
On the one hand, the community tends to cluster around the impression that mathematics is more than the formal system (one could even argue that Godel settled this question a long time ago). So we should not allow AI mathematics to be synonymous to mathematics.
On the other hand, there is clear mathematical value in proving a longstanding conjecture with AI tools (for example NS), even if it will take time for the community to digest it. However, i think attaching names/corporations to these staments will do a lot of harm to the community. For example there will be very few people willing to clean AI slop for someone else when that person/corporation did not put the effort.
There seems to be a need for a clear separation between AI slop proofs and classical mathematical knowledge. For this, a possible solution is to build a parallel platform from archive, adapted to AI, with manuscripts + lean code generated mainly by AI, that have not been fully digested.
Submissions to this site should be anonymous. That way, if a mathematitian needs to digest an AI slop proof to include it in a wider finished work, they would be doing it for the community, not for the original person thay submitted it. Even if submission are anonymous, one could extract anonymous metrics about personal impact factor (which goes beyond number of submissions) that could be included for job application as a metric of AI mathematical contributions. That way we also incentivice AI work.
The site should also serve as a context layer for mathematical AI harnesses. This would further speed up mathematical research.
I am aware this is not a fully landed idea. I am sharing it so that we can start an open discussion to perfect it and build it as a community.
I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Thank you very much in advance.