curt15

> Imagine a programmer telling their boss it’s not about working software it’s about the journey of writing the code. Good luck getting hired.

Imagine the next version of Claude Code or Codex no longer hands you source code and instead turns a natural language prompt directly into a compiled binary that passes the test suite. Would this programmer's boss ship the binary straight to production and dispense with the company's git repo altogether? After all, the goal at the end of the day is shipped software that produces value, not human-readable source code.

ChatGPT has been proficient in the English reading and writing department for even longer, and that shows in the quality of students. E.g. https://nypost.com/2026/01/23/us-news/gen-z-students-are-so-...

Knowledge and labour don't magically exclude the AI labs. Who still needs to get paid in such an endgame?

The announcement doesn't say that the work will be using openai tools. If anything, the events over the past two months provide strong incentive to boost the capabilities of open-weight, local models.

Before talking about spinning off their own startups, ask why they're still hiring lots of human knowledge workers (https://openai.com/careers/search/) when their recent PR releases about triumphs in pure mathematics are calibrated to make people believe their agents are at the precipice of supplanting human knowledge.

Humans could also benefit such a model of idea atoms to consciously explore the "alien space" of a field.

Would you mind a data center sprouting up in your backyard? Just ask residents near Elon's new gas turbine powered GPU datacenters how lovely they find the hum.

Framing the choice as a dichotomy between data centers and other industrial plants misses the obvious third option: nothing at all, preserve the status quo.

> An elderly leader is convinced to issue a decree that all number-math-computation intelligence is to be made available only to the intelligence agencies of his nation, and failure to comply means no IPO and no further investment.

Who would staff those intelligence agencies if humans are no longer able to understand the work product?

> If machines can understand the math and humans can’t, we can’t validate it, but that doesn’t make the math itself invalid.

How can humans tell whether machines understand the math if they themselves don't? Math is a human language for quantitative reasoning.

If large sectors of the population decline in their ability to read and write <natural language>, how will they be able to evaluate machine-generated <natural language>?

"Mathematics is commonly explained and recorded in symbolic and concrete forms that are easy to communicate, rather than in conceptual forms that are easy to understand once communicated. Translation in the direction conceptual -> concrete and symbolic is much easier than translation in the reverse direction, and symbolic forms often replaces the conceptual forms of understanding."

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici...

There's no reason to think the LLM can't be prompted to improve its presentation. Still, can one internalize math simply by reading solution manuals?

The key difference is that the procedure for transforming source code -> machine code is fully explainable by anyone with access to the compiler source code. There are no statistical estimations with black-box parameters involved.

Since your boss thinks the LLM knows what it's doing, letting your boss approve his own PRs would be a win-win.

Even today, math is hardly a crowded field flush with cash.

If AI is doing all the work, why should anyone at the AI companies and hyperscalers still get paid?

Isn't that the essential difference between a free market and a command economy?

Do their own hiring practices reflect that ambition? They sure seem to be recruiting a lot of humans for typical roles in business, legal, and engineering. If they want to flex the power of their models to automate human jobs, why not lead by example?

https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs

> Realistically, math will be done by well funded teams of people instead of cult of personality mathematicians.

Most math is already being done by meagrely funded mathematicians. The entire US federal budget for mathematics is like $100M. One college football coach can already make 10 percent of that. No mathematician is making bank.

Is the implication of all this that mathematics research should get a cash injection to pay for high-powered computational tools?

> The fact that any answers are made public at all is useful to us all. That’s free knowledge.

When mathematicians discover new results, they automatically become experts during the process, and then go around giving talks to explain their results, methods, and intuitions to other mathematicians. After years or sometimes decades of refinement and a healthy dose of serendipity, some of the mental frameworks percolate to other fields.

No one from OpenAI is willing to give a talk on any of their 300+ results because their machines have decoupled formal proofs from actual knowledge.

When mathematicians discover a new result, they automatically become experts during the process, and then go around giving talks to explain their results, methods, and intuitions to other mathematicians. Eventually, some of the mental frameworks percolate to other fields.

No one from OpenAI is willing to give a talk on any of their 300+ results.

There is a fixed landscape of logically provable mathematical statements. Normally, the process of exploring that landscape simultaneously improves human understanding. Now, formal proofs and actual knowledge have become decoupled.

"Mathematics is commonly explained and recorded in symbolic and concrete forms that are easy to communicate, rather than in conceptual forms that are easy to understand once communicated. Translation in the direction conceptual -> concrete and symbolic is much easier than translation in the reverse direction, and symbolic forms often replaces the conceptual forms of understanding."

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici...

> There is no longer anyone to turn to if this system breaks by, eg, having a critical bug that no one can figure out. No causal model in anyone's head that can be appealed to, to slowly and methodically debug.

At this point, why even bother with source code? Source code is designed for humans to comprehend. If humans are no longer the intended audience, why not have machines output and maintain some more efficient intermediate representation of computer programs?

>Let's say GPT-23 Astra grinds away for a full month one day and out pops a warp drive.

In the real world, the frontier labs are still hiring lots of humans for business and software roles (https://openai.com/careers/search/) despite being better positioned than anyone to automate them away with their world-beating models and save a bunch of salaries.

Why not use some of the money to develop open-weight, open-training-pipeline, fully introspectable and hackable LLM-based theorem proving assistants? Make them a commodity in every mathematician's office like other computational tools. Such a project would itself yield research topics.

Who will continue to develop neural nets if the mathematics training pipeline dries up? Will we see the frontier labs relinquish AI research to the machines themselves while their humans apply for unemployment benefits?

> Software engineers are getting laid off because of advancements made by AI.

The bean counters laying off software engineers ought to take notes from the frontier labs' own hiring practices. They're still hiring lots of humans for business and engineering roles even when they would be better positioned than anyone to automate away those jobs with their world-class models (https://openai.com/careers/search/).

When anyone can push a button on a machine and out comes a math result, it still doesn't become theirs or anyone else's until they can internalize it and make it part of their thinking.

The human who commits a bad change still takes the fall though. Automation doesn't absolve accountability.

They'd be left maintaining their own macos server again while everyone else uses Linux for their server farms.

Something like the old folding@home distributed molecular dynamics calculations?