Erdős problems site founder Thomas Bloom on AI's gains and concerns

Summary

[This is a guest post by Thomas Bloom , crossposted from the Erdős problems forum . This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] AI is changing everything, for better and/or worse, and the rate of change is dizzying; in recent months this has been particularly evident in mathematics, where AI has gone from being essentially useless to helping solve some of the hardest problems in mathematics in less than a year. The website http://www.erdosproblems.com has often been on the front line of these changes, and a barometer by which one could measure AI capabilities. This was not at all my intention when I created the site — I wanted to promote these problems to a human audience, and make a useful reference on what work has been done. But the easy availability of a large pool of questions that are simple to state, ranging from easy and obscure to deep and impenetrable, provided the ideal showcase for AI. In some ways this has led to a huge amount of progress — we now know the answer to many questions we did not before. (Although a lot of this recent progress has come from increased human efforts and renewed interest in some problems, rather than just AI solutions.) There have also been negative effects, however: some mathematicians have dismissed Erdős-style mathematics as ‘easy/recreational’; many have stopped thinking about Erdős problems believing that they cannot compete with AI; and, most significantly, there has been a wave of AI-produced solutions provided with no explanation. While of course these are useful and tell us new things, they are also displacing and discouraging those who are actually interested in the mathematics. (These issues have stopped being Erdős-specific as AI continues to make breakthroughs in an ever wider range of fields.) A couple of weeks ago I asked for feedback on how people used the site, and what they thought should be changed. I received, both publicly and privately, a wide variety of opinions, and I’m grateful to everyone for their feedback. What was particularly striking was the number of people I heard from who have benefited a lot from the site, learning new mathematics and finding new problems to think about, but have never commented on the site. I have been particularly conscious of this large silent, audience, and have tried to make sure their experiences were not drowned…