I dont know if its because the new state of things is that all knowledge is now secret and cant be shared.

Or if its because Opus 5.5 has turned even Karpathy into a product owner/manager so now the only interesting things are products (hackertube in this case).

Either of them makes me sad. Although its probably both.

Wake me up when true science is back.

In any case, im a big fan of Karpathy.

Other people usually care only about "gain", its their only motivation. Non "gain" results are just happy accidents.

And "gain" (once you have your survival covered) is just an invented abstraction with 0 real meaning. But people try to convince themselfs that it has meaning.

This goes back to the classic story for "kids" about the emperor that has no clothes.

Maths is a language, and learning a language takes time. Its like if I say that japanese made an effort to obfuscate their language just because i cannot read it or read it as fast as english.

LLMs are autimating some part of maths which is formal manipulation. It happens that computers are much better than humans at formal manipulation. In the same way that computers are much better at mathematical computations. That is the huge change in the field. But any working mathematitian can tell you that formal manipulation is just part of the research job.

The powerfull thing about maths is that formal manipulation has allowed humans to go further "for free": you just need to understand the foundations, and the formal system allows you to compute new results for free without needing to reunderstand them.

I get HN is a Software site. But all math posts are invaded by people that think Math=Software. Probably based on the way they were taught maths when they were young.

Why would a theoretical physicist spend 30 years developing a theory that could be made false by a new experiment with a new technology? Was Newton gravitation worth if einstein was going to come later?

We are heading directly into a world where people forget about what values, philosophy, poetry, math, physics, or any other "non economically valuable" things are. And we all know what happened any other times in history when that happened.

You may say "hey, before AI people payed for math salaries even though they didnt understand the math or the economic outcome". But the issue is there are now "mathematitians" trying to convince not to fund.

In this new reality, you will get "mathematitians" trying to convince that only AI maths matter. And on the other side someone speaking about "understanding", "taste", "community". And the people deciding to fund dont have the skills to differentiate. So they will fund the AI boosters with a higher probability.

Thats how the job of professional mathematitian dissapears. By being replaced by something that on the surface looks similar, but its just an ugly copy.

Thats one of the timeless human debates.

We are now living in the perfect combo of low morality and general human automation. So i expect the next few decades dominated by people who think (and have a "proof") that doing something without an expected economic gain is useless.

In my experience, every new model release allows me to go further, although every time i see every time the limitations, and i identify where i add value. And this value gets bigger every time.

But on the other hand, every model release reduces the amount of people that are able to value this "added value", because it requires more skills.

So we have the paradox that the added value i can bring on top gets bigger and bigger, but the perception of the economic value for the majority of the population gets smaller.

There is a world where we get to the edge of AI capabilities, and we build on top of that. As humans have always done with every new technology.

There is another more pessimistic view where LLMs just replace every human capability, and our economic overlords dont need us for anything and we just eat the small pieces of bread that are left.

This comes down to the fact of:

is human existence/intelligence just the simbolic representations we make in our brain? Or are they just a tool?

I tend to think of Godels incompleteness theorem as a proof that on the limit LLMs are useless. The real question for me is at what point approaching this limit becomes an issue, and if it has any practical consequences.

Everything else is secondary (or the last of our priorities) and would be better automated?

This is a hard pill to swallow

To follow your methaphore, who is directing the spaceship?

This feels more like fireworks than a space launch. Space launches would not have happened without having fireworks first of course, but I am looking forward for the space launch moment.

For me this reads as someone boasting about how they go to buy bread on a ferrari to the supermarket, while i sit listening to it, having no idea what they are talking about. And then i stand up and go walking to my favourite boulangerie.

Warning: if you are from the USA you may be triggered by this metaphore.

But this guy is too high on AI, verging on AI psycosis. A more sober version is what Science will look like.

Mathematitians exchanged proofs for employment. That was the currency. Now they cannot use that currency anymore, so the question is how does someone know if they should hire an unknow person or not?

Philosophicaly who cares if you like more theory building or theorem proving? You dont need to convince anyone. The only solution is to be curious and follow your interests and naturally humanity will redefine what the new mathematics feels like.

You cannot convince anyone about it, its not something rational.