Math AI

However, one notable feature of the current AI era is the absence of any definitive such boundaries. While AI tools have flattened the difficulty landscape now in many areas of the subject, thus destroying the ability to locate promising new problems in that area, there are no clear frontiers that are separating the "AI-feasible" problems from the "AI-hard" problems (which certainly still exist, given that the difficulty level of problems are unbounded, and can even be undecidable). This is in part due to the rapidly changing nature of the technology, but also compounded by the refusal of AI companies to disclose their negative results, or reveal the process towards obtaining their solutions. In fact, it is now the identification of a promising problem which is the scarce and precious resource. We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential. The incentives may now be pointing in the direction of no longer sharing any promising research directions with the broader community, which would reverse centuries of traditions of open science and do serious long-term damage to the future of the field. (3/4)