Ex-OpenAI researcher Scott Aaronson admits AI one-shotted open problems from his 25-year-old papers, while accelerating the atrophy of his own mathematical skills: “This summer I fed in some of the open problems from my papers 25 years ago, and just boom, boom, boom. It solved them in a one-shot way." "These are problems that probably I could have solved if I had spent enough time, more like 100 hours at the least. But these days I don’t really get contiguous hours to think." "AI accelerates the atrophying of my own skills. If it’s something you could work out in some hours, but GPT can just work it out for you right now, that is very tempting to do, and I often do it." @UTAustin

Ex-OpenAI researcher Scott Aaronson explains how AI is breaking mathematical limits once thought impossible, including a 50-year barrier to multiplying numbers: "A month ago we saw a solution of the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the seven millennium problems. If water were an infinitely divisible substance, just following the laws of classical physics, in finite time some of the water would get accelerated to an infinite speed." "There’s now a way to multiply two n-digit integers in time that is less than n log n, which had stood as a barrier for half a century. Many of us believed that was gonna be the ultimate limit. Now we know it’s not." "There’s a better algorithm for the Fourier transform. Your phone, all your electronics are using it constantly. We just learned that what we thought was the limit is not the limit." @UTAustin

Ex-OpenAI researcher Scott Aaronson says an asteroid has landed on mathematics, and denial is no longer a viable strategy: "It would be crazy to not be worried right now about the future of the mathematical community. This is an asteroid that has landed on our world. People are in different stages of denial, grief, bargaining, acceptance. But denial is just not going to be a viable strategy." "The model that OpenAI used is something that will plausibly be available to regular subscribers a few months from now." "Almost any paper that you read will contain a little AI statement which explains which parts came from Astra or from Claude. That became part of writing a paper within the last few months, without any fanfare." "Normally you say, it would be interesting to follow up this result, and over the next year people will think about it. Now it’s like, I actually already put that question into Fable, and I just got an answer right now. I still haven’t adjusted to the speed." @UTAustin