About how AI's growing role in mathematics is forcing big questions.
Has this happened?
Yes 52 (42%)Not sure 37 (30%)No 36 (29%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About how AI's growing role in mathematics is forcing big questions.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
It's amazing how much attention this issue has gotten. What is lost in the hype is no AI can tell you if a proof is correct. An AI can produce a convincing looking proof, but it can have a subtle but critical error or make an assumption that is unfounded. Thus, it ultimately comes down to humans. A mathematician has to craft the prompt, and mathematician to interpret/check the results. Also, these programs are very expensive and propitiatory. They are not like the commercial AI that regular people use. It takes considerable prompting and trial an error to solve even Olympiad/Putnam problems, and tons of work by humans pouring over the results to see if it's correct. For every Erdos problem that captures the headlines, there are many where it failed or untold hours of prompting and token burn to get that result, and manhours verify it.