An internal OpenAI Astra model solved 10 major open math and CS problems

This is what the Ludites were trying to accomplish with an (armed) uprising.

Go back 100 years and 15 percent of the population was "Farmer", and 30 percent were in some sort of "domestic" work.

Most modern jobs are a product of the fact that technology continues to advance. And by all measures it does not look like "ai" is going to change that.

Yes, but in practice that doesn’t happen. Again, I did not hear a loud protest against automation of all types of labor from the intelligentsia in the past.

In practice automation is great, as long as it doesn’t hit “the ones that matter” (a label which they themselves assign). I find it very hard to not imagine the smallest, tiniest violin playing the saddest song for them.

Again, “respect for mathematicians” and “their work”.. please. Just produce results. That’s all that ever mattered and let’s not change the rules of the game just because they don’t suit you anymore.

One would think something like the study of the square root of negative 1 would have little utility beyond a hand-wavy appeal to understanding, but it turns out to have major practical applications ranging from electrical engineering to 3d rotations.

I tend to believe we're still likely at a very primitive level of technology. It's difficult to imagine this primarily because of unknown unknowns. For instance at the end of the 19th century it was believed that science had basically been finished, and all that remained was working things out to ever higher levels of precision to wrap up a few curiosities.

Then along come relativity, quantum mechanics, and more - all completely revolutionizing science, and upending centuries of false beliefs. I think we're far more likely to be at the end of the 19th century again, rather than at the end of science, or anywhere near such. And if that's the case, then it may well be that seemingly academic discoveries of today, perhaps ultimately achieved by an LLM, are what help unlock the next great revolution.

Once you have experienced first hand the level of disdain the so called intellectuels have towards the regular joe it is hard to feel any sympathy for them. If I can be replaced with cheap foreign labour you too should just deal with it. You are not entitled to your well paying oil drilling job, you know, you should just move on and take another job or two and some nightly backbreaking gigs here and there if math doesn't feed your family any more. Surely you don't want to be lazier than immigrants and can adjust to their frugal standards of living...

Exceptional mathematicians are not going to be jobless, just like master level craftsmen still do kinda well. Tough luck if your abilities are subpar to achieve excellence though, that is just the rat race to the bottom we have created and finally the so called intellectuels are also getting to fully taste it themselves. Realizing you were never that special and your job can be either fully automated away or reduced to a wage that barely pays the bills is a hard pill to swallow. But progress is inevitable as they have been saying.

I will keep studying math purely for fun.

> business doesn’t care one bit about your clean architecture or clever design

Perhaps not in general, but this is nothing new or related to AI. For one thing software is a strangely private craft - your boss is likely only aware of what you are producing, not the craft or quality (or not) that went into it - the only ones aware of that would be co-workers who are looking at your source code, and perhaps choosing to use it or not. Secondly, the sad truth in business, not just for software developers, is that there is a huge amount of truth in "it's not what you know, it's who you know".

> People are having a rough time figuring out that good design and fundamentals no longer align with the business side of things.

The business may be unaware of what your code looks like, or the expertise that went into it to avoid bad outcomes (immediate or future), but they surely DO care when poor quality software leads to production outages, and customer complaints, and their boss yelling at them as a result. The results of poor quality software will manifest in many ways, not just the poor reliability and performance of your latest release, but also the future outcomes of attempts to build on top of it.

I think it's extremely early to assess the impact of AI software quality and the ways it impacts businesses in these ways, such as production outages, that they do care about. There have certainly been well publicized cases such as AWS outages blamed on AI, but although it seems like an eternity it's only been ~6 months since AI really became usefully competent and capable of "vibe coding", so I think we're only just beginning to see the results.

Companies and bosses that have enthusiastically adopted AI are unlikely to point to AI and themselves if/when it proves to be detrimental (AWS were quick to deny it, despite the insider leaks to the contrary), so I'd not be surprised if it takes years rather than months for there to be much clarity on this.

FWIW, I think there is a considerable difference between math, which is what we're really discussing here, and software development, regarding how quickly it will or has fallen to AI. Math is really uniquely suited to LLMs and reinforcement learning of domain-specific reasoning since mathematical papers basically consist of nothing but reasoning (training data!), and it is an entirely theoretical field that essentially lives in the world of language (incl. mathematical notation) without any external grounding. Contrast to software development where what is available to train on is mostly the end result (code) rather than the reasoning that got you there, and there is also a large "experimental" aspect - what happens in the real world when you run the produced artifact.

Anti-intellectualism is not worse than being against the actual working class (those stupid rednecks who don't even know what is best for them).