Arguably it is succeeding on this front - LLMs have been much more helpful for learning about mathematics topics than Wikipedia for a while now. Admittedly a somewhat low bar, but they are genuinely helpful. In many other fields the models can still only pull up equal (in my opinion).

> If the aim of mathematics is to promote greater human understanding...

Is this the aim of mathematics?

A lot of people are tired of a lot of talk. It's not going to get anywhere if they all just consider the other views as only possibly held by liars instead of something to discuss and reason about.

Yes people have broken down the norms, but AI isn't eclipsing anything. AI itself is a human achievement. By my count AI contributions to society are still 0.00000001% of human contributions to society, and it's not catching up since once of its main effects on humans is to make them antisocial. The reason I'm not freaking out is that it's the AI users who are destroying themselves. The more you buy into the lie of an AI future, the more it is you being sucked dry. I just don't have the energy to save people that don't want to saved, and LLM users and gambling addicts fall in this category for exactly the same reasons

I generally agree with what you're saying, but...

> at the mercy of the new AI hegemony

Unless their robot army is fully armed and ready when things get bad enough they'll find out we aren't at their mercy, they are at ours.

England 1381. France 1789. Haiti 1791. Russia 1917. China 1949. World 203X...?

Would be preferable to avoid letting things get to that point by having those in power be smart enough to release the pressure valves as was done in the US around the time of the New Deal, but if they fumble this we shouldn't view being at the mercy of the elites as a forgone conclusion.

Once the average person's base level comfort is gone and they aren't sure where their next 3 meals are coming from anything can happen.

>AI understanding of math is millions times more important than human's.

This is a persistent misconception that I see on HN (although not usually framed as abrasively as you have chosen to frame it).

Math is not an engineering discipline. Pure mathematics research is not done with an eye towards practical applications in other fields. You should think of it more like the humanities--it is done because it enriches the human experience (and it's not very expensive).

You could give us a black box oracle that could tell us, with 100% certainty, whether the 50 most famous and important open conjectures in math were true or false, and it would be more or less worthless. What does it actually get you? This isn't a rhetorical question.

AI in math is valuable only insofar as it ultimately helps drive human understanding.

There is another side of math that is more driven by practical applications: statistics and "applied math" and whatnot. This is what most people think of when they try to imagine math research, because it is much closer to the math that they have learned in their school education. A lot (but not all) of this math would get more value out of black box results, yes. But don't conflate this with the entire field of mathematics as a whole.

> This keeps being repeated by AI skeptics, yet AI keeps solving more and more complex tasks. We've reached the point that it's even started solving Millennium problems.

Yes, so? Still not "novel ideas and insights", which is what you responded to ... and the statement wasn't made by an AI skeptic.

> This is the future of pushing the frontier though. AIs need to be pushed to get better and better.

It would be far more honest to say "I want AIs to get better and better". But there are costs. What are you willing to accept?

> AI understanding of math is millions times more important than human's.

Ah, it seems that "replace humans with AIs" is not too much for you.

To whom is that more important? Not mathematicians.

> This keeps being repeated by AI skeptics,

And now you're hearing it from a guy who's one of the foremost, early proponents of AI in math.

> AI understanding of math is millions times more important than human's.

Important to whom?

> We've reached the point that it's even started solving Millennium problems.

Since you’re so certain, how long do you think it’ll be before all of the millennium problems are solved by AI (by leveraging the current literature)?

Math as a field is unbounded. There's always more to discover, new systems to invent, new problems to find. It's not just some predefined set of unsolved problems.

Math is also a matter of what is both interesting and useful to humans.

For some reason there is this virulent strain of anti-human AI rhetoric that machines will replace us. But what is the purpose of math as a field of study if we're not in the loop?

Tasks are not simply integer “difficulties” where, if your “intelligence” exceeds the “difficulty” then you will solve it.

The question is to what extent AI will affect creation of new branches and elegant ideas in mathematics. This question applies to every area. Has it created an interesting new way of thought in any area other than those where massive tree search can be mistaken for such?

I don’t think it’s impossible but the evidence doesn’t point clearly to it.

> [mathematics] being funded by a small number of rich [people]

Historically this has always been the case. Rich people or people supported by rich people did math, while peasants worked the fields and workers worked in factories/mines/etc. This is just regression toward the mean.