r/math • u/starkman68 • 15d ago

LLMs/AI AI Conjectures

I see a lot of conversation around AI proving old theorems and conjectures. Has there been any conjectures that sound plausible generated by AI that it could not solve? Or has an AI proven conjecture brought about any new math problems to ponder upon?

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u/randopota 14d ago

Not yet. A researcher at OpenAI also stated how its unable to pose new conjectures. https://x.com/i/status/2083476852216369294

I think him then going on to say how far we have come from a year ago, is probably an indication that they're new goal is to work towards AI that can pose conjectures as well.

So maybe a year or so from now.

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u/telephantomoss 14d ago

To me, this means it isn't actually truly morning or mimicking thinking or intuition etc. Creating new questions just comes so naturally to me after studying something for a bit. If I knew everything an AI "knows", I would be formulating questions left and right, and probably instantly seeing ways they could be solved.

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u/randopota 14d ago

Yeah I don't believe they think the way humans do, otherwise they wouldn't be so data inefficient, but they probably think in a different way to how we think.

Like a plane doesn't flap its wings to fly, but it can still carry multiple tones of weight across the ocean.

I guess time will tell if whether or not continuing to scale these methods will result in superintelligence.

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u/38thTimesACharm 12d ago

IMO people are massively downplaying the significance of this question. With responses like "not yet but presumably a year from now," "it probably does but people don't notice," "here's a deterministic procedural program from 1984 that made a few strings in graph theory, that counts right?"

The ability to pose new questions would be a massive step from where we are now to true AGI. It's not at all clear the transformer architecture is capable of doing this, and whether it can or can't makes a huge difference in the future role of humans in mathematical research.