Do you know where “the ball” is going? Do these math students? Do the professors? It’s easy to say a vague nothing platitude like “target where the ball is going to” but such empty vague platitudes do not help anyone and just waste time.
I assumed the student ultimately wants a career that is financially viable.
> Then what?
Literally anything else?
Ironically, this very attitude could lead to AI creating one of the biggest slowdowns in progress in history.
It's this one, but different careers will diminish at different rates. Mathematics was already not financially well rewarded, and current AI is basically better than everyone in the field.
> this very attitude could lead to AI creating one of the biggest slowdowns in progress in history
I think there are enough young people with pre-AI experience that we'll probably develop superintelligence before they retire, so I don't really think a near-term lack of fresh talent will result in any significant slowdown.
Then why are frontier labs ploughing millions into racing human math researchers when they're already cash-strapped? What's the ROI for that?
> we'll probably develop superintelligence before they retire.
That ship has sailed:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/inau...
Human-crafted religious items and artwork may be more appealing than machine-crafted replicas.
Do programming, electrical engineering, control systems, robotics, ML, statistics, etc.
Eg, we're probably very far off from having factories or new devices be entirely designed and built by robots. Somebody's going to need to get their hands dirty for quite a while still.
> What specific direct advice would you give then if you could talk to someone who is currently studying math?
Do it for personal satisfaction, but find another way to pay the bills.
FWIW, I did like that the article at least acknowledged that the fundamental question is whether LLM-based approaches will eventually "max out", i.e. will they be limited to the "convex hull of ideas outlined in literature" as the article out it.
If LLMs do eventually hit a wall, then great, humans will still have a role to play. If not, though, we're all completely fucked - none of this nonsense about "humans managing agents" or providing "unique human insight" and what not, as agents will be more than capable of managing themselves and providing superior insight.
Mathematics was historically "just a hobby". Much theoretical work is still "just a hobby". But, for the past few hundred years, humans that better understood the theory could find very profitable applications.
That is no longer true. Computers have solved mathematics, like they did chess two decades ago. A human will never find a better application than a computer, just like they will never find a better chess move. Yet people still play chess, and people still make money tutoring chess.
That is the future of humans in mathematics. Mathematics will become mathematics competitions. It will be just another intellectual sport. Sure, a sport that teaches valuable life lessons, but still "just a game". If you are going into mathematics today, your future career is as a competition mathematics coach.
1. I recognized that understanding math had incredibly profitable applications.
2. It was a sport.
3. It was a hobby.
Do I think the world will look the same when math is "solved"? Absolutely not! And we're seeing it transform right before our eyes. I routinely ask Claude, "here's the general idea for a math/cs/ai problem I'm working on, can you help me figure out the maths? oh and then implement it too."
Could I figure this out myself? Of course. Having the idea is halfway to formalizing it in math. But I remember even last year working on GPU kernels by hand and having a bunch of little arithmetic or indexing errors burn me, because I'm just slower and less perfect at doing the math correctly. Now I basically just tell Claude, "go optimize a GPU kernel for this problem". I still have to tell it what to look out for (architectural, algorithmic, memory improvements), but I'm sure the next model won't even need that.