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    AI

    Is knowledge useful if nobody understands it?

    One post connects the question of knowledge’s usefulness to the step-by-step automation of knowledge production.

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    84 Sources, 23d ago, first seen 23d ago

    TLDR

    A user describes knowledge production as being automated “step-by-step” and raises what they suggest may be a bigger question for humanity: “Is knowledge useful if nobody understands it?”

    Combined views

    5.2M

    84 Sources, first seen 23d ago

    37.3K likes

    Combined views

    5.2M

    84 Sources, first seen 23d ago

    37.3K likes
    2.7K comments
    7.6K saves
    4.8K reposts
    2.7K comments
    7.6K saves
    4.8K reposts

    Sentiment

    Positive35.4%64.6%Negative

    Summary

    Sentiment

    Positive35.4%64.6%Negative

    Positive accounts focus on AI accelerating math discoveries and practical benefits despite professional losses, while negative accounts worry about lost intellectual stimulation, status, and credit for human work.

    Based on 505 sentiment-bearing replies from 362 accounts across 10 conversations.

    Summary

    Positive accounts focus on AI accelerating math discoveries and practical benefits despite professional losses, while negative accounts worry about lost intellectual stimulation, status, and credit for human work.

    Based on 505 sentiment-bearing replies from 362 accounts across 10 conversations.

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    84 Sources

    @RishiBommasaniAs many mathematicians have said in recent days, frontier AI companies are trampling on research mathematics as a fancy benchmark. That is a great shame and the irony could not be more pronounced. These companies employ some wonderful mathematicians, and many more who studied mathematics as students. Mathematics is a hallowed institution many at these companies have long admired. We shall see what it is to come. I doubt it will play out as I would hope, but I hope they treat the mathematics discipline and its incredible scholars with deserved respect and dignity. Mathematics should not be treated as something to be plundered and conquered to reveal AI prowess. Technological progress in frontier AI can deliver incredible mathematical innovations. But this should not come at the cost of desecrating a human tradition that has long borne the torch for intellectual progress.
    @teortaxesTexGiven how Levent has spent like two months pissing people in the mathematical community off with his unorthodox communication, I think OpenAI wins the sympathy vote, at least on priors.
    @XMihurathe math academic community is already collapsing AI will kill academia and in fact it will kill most knowledge work some revolt is expected
    @EMostaqueIt’s best to think of AI in math as peak, non-hermit form Grothendieck Massive reach, absolute machine Einstein of mathematics A data center full of them https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-alexander-grothendieck-revolutionized-20th-century-mathematics-20260520/
    @PlinzMathematicians are warning that AI threatens their field
    @stanislavfortI'm very confused about the AI in math controversy. If these problems are worth solving, why not solve them? I guess a counterargument is that human mathematicians, in solving them, develop reusable tooling to tackle other problems, and AIs don't do that now, which is a fair point. However, if that's the case, why don't we use AIs to get that as well, to distill the reusable mathematical infrastructure out of the particular proofs. Shouldn't the push then be to do that with AI, rather than block AI from tackling the problems in the first place, e.g. like the senior math people blocking the Caltech hackathon and issuing vague threats to the participants? If, on the other hand, senior mathematicians view math as primarily an aesthetic endeavor where human provenance is key, then this is certainly not the way the public thinks about them and their field, and why they are funded by the public at all.
    @suchenzangjfc the arrogance of pure math mathematicians has no bounds registering two predictions now: 1) this will be the next gen version of yann lecun's autoregressive-models-have-exponentially-compounding-errors garbage theory 2) morph into a crypto rug-pull labor in the data and software systems mines at least once, kids, or else you end up with big brain psychosis!
    @mayukh_panjaI have been simulating fluids for 15 years. There is a widespread impression that the Navier Stokes equations have been now “solved”, thanks to OpenAI. This suggests that they were “unsolved” so far and this was a major engineering breakthrough. This is not true. This misunderstanding deeply bothers me as a computational physicist. So I had to put this out.
    @srchvrs@suchenzang We are scientists, not just some lowly engineers who can't have (new) ideas!
    @TheEconomist24 Fields Medal winners have written a letter of objection https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/09/11/top-mathematicians-are-outraged-by-openais-methods?taid=6aa43972129c9200012a636d&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

    84 Sources

    @RishiBommasaniAs many mathematicians have said in recent days, frontier AI companies are trampling on research mathematics as a fancy benchmark. That is a great shame and the irony could not be more pronounced. These companies employ some wonderful mathematicians, and many more who studied mathematics as students. Mathematics is a hallowed institution many at these companies have long admired. We shall see what it is to come. I doubt it will play out as I would hope, but I hope they treat the mathematics discipline and its incredible scholars with deserved respect and dignity. Mathematics should not be treated as something to be plundered and conquered to reveal AI prowess. Technological progress in frontier AI can deliver incredible mathematical innovations. But this should not come at the cost of desecrating a human tradition that has long borne the torch for intellectual progress.
    @teortaxesTexGiven how Levent has spent like two months pissing people in the mathematical community off with his unorthodox communication, I think OpenAI wins the sympathy vote, at least on priors.
    @XMihurathe math academic community is already collapsing AI will kill academia and in fact it will kill most knowledge work some revolt is expected
    @EMostaqueIt’s best to think of AI in math as peak, non-hermit form Grothendieck Massive reach, absolute machine Einstein of mathematics A data center full of them https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-alexander-grothendieck-revolutionized-20th-century-mathematics-20260520/
    @PlinzMathematicians are warning that AI threatens their field
    @stanislavfortI'm very confused about the AI in math controversy. If these problems are worth solving, why not solve them? I guess a counterargument is that human mathematicians, in solving them, develop reusable tooling to tackle other problems, and AIs don't do that now, which is a fair point. However, if that's the case, why don't we use AIs to get that as well, to distill the reusable mathematical infrastructure out of the particular proofs. Shouldn't the push then be to do that with AI, rather than block AI from tackling the problems in the first place, e.g. like the senior math people blocking the Caltech hackathon and issuing vague threats to the participants? If, on the other hand, senior mathematicians view math as primarily an aesthetic endeavor where human provenance is key, then this is certainly not the way the public thinks about them and their field, and why they are funded by the public at all.
    @suchenzangjfc the arrogance of pure math mathematicians has no bounds registering two predictions now: 1) this will be the next gen version of yann lecun's autoregressive-models-have-exponentially-compounding-errors garbage theory 2) morph into a crypto rug-pull labor in the data and software systems mines at least once, kids, or else you end up with big brain psychosis!
    @mayukh_panjaI have been simulating fluids for 15 years. There is a widespread impression that the Navier Stokes equations have been now “solved”, thanks to OpenAI. This suggests that they were “unsolved” so far and this was a major engineering breakthrough. This is not true. This misunderstanding deeply bothers me as a computational physicist. So I had to put this out.
    @srchvrs@suchenzang We are scientists, not just some lowly engineers who can't have (new) ideas!
    @TheEconomist24 Fields Medal winners have written a letter of objection https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/09/11/top-mathematicians-are-outraged-by-openais-methods?taid=6aa43972129c9200012a636d&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter