It Only Counts When AI Gets to My Field

It’s a meme at this point. When Deep Blue beat Kasparov, Go players could say that their game, unlike Chess, was too complex to fall to a computer program. Then AlphaGo showed they were wrong. It just took a better approach. When AlphaFold leaped ahead of human experts in predicting how proteins fold, it was due to a mountain of carefully labeled protein structure data. Other scientists and mathematicians could argue that nothing like that existed in their field, so a similar success was unlikely. But LLMs can now navigate scientific literature, and loosely imitate the reasoning process of a mathematical proof. And increasingly, the math and computer science results coming out of AI labs are ones that humans find impressive. Now, experts argue about how far AI can really go. Will AI mathematics only be good at finding counterexamples and solving cute puzzles, not introducing new concepts and frameworks? Will AI only be meaningfully good at fields like mathematics with clear rules and…