It happened again. In today’s arXiv Jef Pauwels claims the solution of the I3322 problem: namely that the maximal violation of the I3322 inequality cannot be reached with finite-dimensional strategies, and indeed it is the limit of the Pál-Vértesi strategy. Of course, the result was found by AI. Pauwels claims he simply gave ChatGPT the problem and told it he believed it could do it. And three hours later, a problem that had been open for almost two decades was solved.
Where is the glory in that, though? Anybody could have written that prompt, and indeed one Seth Douglas, who is apparently not even a researcher, claimed the same result a month earlier. Echoing Terence Tao, Pauwels claims the glory now lies on “proof digestion”, making a readable paper out of raw LLM output. Fair enough, unlike the earlier NPA non-convergence result, his paper is actually readable. But then he claims he did it with Claude.
As you might have guessed from the title of the blog post, I disagree.
First of all, I didn’t get into science to polish LLM turds. The reason I accepted low pay, long hours, moving countries, and instability is because I love doing science. Not giving problems to a machine and giving it a pep talk. Even less trying to make sense of LLM drivel. I suspect I’m not alone here. Indeed the students nowadays don’t seem to have motivation to learn. Why bother, if there’s no scientific work left? Almost all of them are just trying to cheat their way to a degree with LLMs. And that’s a drastic change, when I was an undergrad those who paid somebody else to write their thesis were the exception, not the rule.
Secondly, as Pauwels illustrated very well, LLMs can also do digestion. Trying to find a special role that only humans can do is a fool’s errand. Tao acknowledges that, and tries to reserve for humans the role of being the “bosses” of mathematics, deciding which proofs are relevant and interesting and should be taught. Taught to whom? Relevant to whom? Who the fuck is going to care?
I think this is the death of pure research. When we did the research ourselves, we could tell society that it should pay us because we were learning something, and teaching something, and perhaps even discovering something that might in a century be actually useful. But why should society pay us to type the prompts and “digest” the results? There is no public funding for sommeliers, those who just want to appreciate wine need to pay for it themselves.1
Applied research remains, of course. Society wants a result, and pays people to get it, doesn’t matter how they do it. I just think it will get much more expensive when people no longer do it out of love.