Description du poste
This is a weird moment. I have a hunch that we'll look back later and tell ourselves stories in which it seemed obvious where things were going. So I wanted to lay down a little time capsule and register just how confusing everything felt at the time. This is a personal view from the trenches.
1.If you're a normal person, you may feel that AI has been good at math for a long time.[1]But for "real" math, this is roughly what it felt like:
When
Feeling
2024
LLMs are toys
Summer 2025
LLMs are interesting toys
Early Autumn 2025
LLMs can do useful stuff sometimes
Mid Autumn 2025
…a lot of stuff
Late Autumn 2025
…a lot
Early 2026
holy god
Even having been astonished by AI progress in the past, it was still astonishing to see AI move in a matter of months from a mildly-useful toy to something that many people now consider almost impossible to do without.
2.Personally, I'd say that current AI makes me around 50% more productive at "doing math". That's despite the fact that AI can now often do in a few minutes things that would have taken me hours to do myself.
The main reason is that my concept of "doing math" involves various steps, like coming up with ideas for theorems, trying to prove them, writing things down, reorganizing everything to make it more clear, and so on. AI is good at some parts of this, but still pretty bad at others, so the overall speedup isn't as high as you might expect.
(Even if planes could go 10× faster, your door-to-door travel time from your apartment in London to your friend's place in Rome wouldn't decrease that much, because you still have to get to the airport and wait to board.)
3.But then, I'm still (sort of; more on this later) trying to follow my old "doing math" workflow, just automating certain parts of it. That can't be right, can it?
If we found a way to make batteries at 1% of the current cost, we wouldn't just say, "cool, batteries are cheap now". We'd find all sorts of new ways to use batteries that didn't make sense before, and ch