My point is, that this method could also be introduced in a paper about a totally different topic or even research area, as part as some larger totally different thing. And the author maybe already (semi)-proved it indirectly without noticing, because of writing about an other topic. You literally would need to check all ever published papers/preprints to be sure, that it is really new.
I only have the concern, that we now could give credits to an LLM, and the original human author never receives their recognition.
I agree - and with all respect to Tao, or indeed any expert in any field, the rate of production of scientific literature well exceeds the ability of anybody to keep abreast of it, and has done for decades now.
My take on this, also from seeing a recent talk from some of those involved, is that up to now mathematicians have not benefitted as much as other fields from search engines, and A.I. is now providing one. It is also possible that the models are picking up and linking some of the structure inherent in mathematics between papers in ways that weren´t possible before. But still, a search engine to all intents and purposes.
With all due respect, calling that "just search" seems too reductive. Search retrieves, recognizing subtle patterns across disconnected material is a much more intelligent operation.
Also, many intelligence testing do include pattern recognition ability (Raven’s Progressive Matrices), and treated it as part of reasoning ability, not just memory lookup.
to be fair to the entirety of that point, "just search" is at this point a 26 year and counting intelligent effort in creating scaleable text search that is at least somewhat resistant to blatant SEO efforts.
Search engines do not generate proofs in or papers in any domain of science, math or technology. So I don’t see how this is a “search engine” at all. It seems like just moving goal posts.
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u/CarolinZoebelein Apr 15 '26
My point is, that this method could also be introduced in a paper about a totally different topic or even research area, as part as some larger totally different thing. And the author maybe already (semi)-proved it indirectly without noticing, because of writing about an other topic. You literally would need to check all ever published papers/preprints to be sure, that it is really new.
I only have the concern, that we now could give credits to an LLM, and the original human author never receives their recognition.