Rather suddenly, cyborgs are starting to dominate math research.

This is a good point I had not fully considered

De-skilling myself on doing CAPTCHAS and navigating dark patterns in customer service.

Also a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires.

Just thinking that Paul Simon wrote that we were living in the "days of miracle and wonder" because of the availability of long-distance calls and slow motion cameras.

Its reasonable for mathematicians to point out that more proofs are not always the same thing as advancing mathematics. But it suggests a need for new goals for what math is trying to do. I think the same thing will happen everywhere. 100x more PowerPoint or code is not always progress - what is?

From The Lancet: in an urgent care setting, the advice of the obsolete Gemini 2.5 Pro & Gemini 2.5 Flash (without access to patient medical records) were rated of similar quality to doctors by other physicians. There was no safety issues spotted. Models have gotten significantly better since.

The few attempts to measure similar things (METR Long Tasks, GDPval) all became saturated earlier this year as AIs began to do days of work at a high quality level.

As a researcher who did early some work on the productivity impacts of AI chatbots using RCTs, I’d note a lack of similar studies since the dawn of true agents last fall Partially that is newness & partially research design challenges, but I suspect we are missing some large & important effects

Anyhow, I think we are now done with the last round of skeptical responses to AI after Navier-Stokes. Yes, AI is now capable of producing novel proofs to hard problems that have eluded us The next line will be that this is only constrained to math because of RL training. I suspect not, we will see.

When people talk about AI easily replacing workers, I think about this ethnography of copier repair technicians in the 1990s. Reading it, you see how work is complicated and improvised by workers and informal and badly documented. (But eventually technology did largely eliminate this job)

(And I am seeing rapid increases in the ability of AI to do novel work in my field of economic sociology, with nearly autonomous research getting very close to top journal level)

After a brief but institution-eroding slop science era, it increasingly looks like we are going to have 2 revolutions from AI: 1) Everything ever published will be re-read and re-judged in ways that human scientists never anticipated 2) Novel discoveries will start to come faster than we can absorb

I think people are muddling through to some extent. But also some of the early warnings about things like mass psychosis seem to not be appearing in the data. There are lots of reasons why we may be underestimating negative impacts but also many observers expected a lot of obvious stuff by now.