Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics

We allow prior work as long as it's labelled. We record chat logs, so it's easy to verify what's prior work. When we evaluate the significance of a result, we focus on the part produced at the event.

Now, I think it's the case that professional mathematics spends way too much money on open problems and way less than it should on pedagogy, exposition, mastery, etc. But that has always been a problem, even decades ago (I've been complaining about it my whole life). AI just finally puts pressure on the world to do something about it. I find it relieving, honestly. And I'm an AI skeptic in many other ways; it's not an AI-maximalism thing. I genuinely think the state of the field of mathematics has been something of a disaster for a long time (thanks, largely, due to the academic incentive structure which heavily favors novel results, no matter how esoteric).

why is that a concern in this context? would you have asked the same about steam engines and horses?

this is a really cool concept, organized very well. and that is very commendable.

So far humans failed at those problems. Also IIRC there was a guy that proved a substantial problem 2-3 months ago by basically pasting over and over "keep looking for a solution" or something like that for 2 days with little formal math background.

I wonder how models perform on finding analogies between analogies

I'm not sure people need to organize a mathathon to wait for a computer to give a printout. They mainly need tokens.

Because the companies that run frontier models are malevolent by every metric.

They are destroying the environment, especially those in neighborhoods of low income people.

They are empowering their owners who are some of the most deplorable and duplicitous people living.

They are destroying personal compute to avoid competition with local models by buying all computer components with “promised money” and forcing their P into AI.

They stole the entire creative output of humanity and are trying to sell it back to us.

They are only good for giving wealth access to skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.

They are being used to kill in war and for surveillance.

Seriously why would you use them? Your use only emboldens them; making you complicit in their nefarious success.

I for one, am one who walks away from Omelas.

I am also a bit frustrated seeing maths go in the direction of prompt enginnering. I am afraid of a world were a math phd student cannot go one week thinking about a problem without prompting an LLM to give him/her an invented answer. Something is lost along the way.

For me maths is not Lean, or formal systems, or an agent reasoning about formal systems to join literature from different fields. I see the value of it, but i think it will make it way more difficult for students (and profesional mathematitians) to see beyond that. And i see us heading into a reality were those who think like me will in practice remain a minority for quite a few years/decades because the low hanging fruit of LLMs will be to vast to ignore.

This seems like a strawman. It’s certainly not consensus that AGI has been achieved and I don’t think the people participating in this event feel like there is no value in human input or steering the AI.