Tyler Cowen Summary:
I am a mathematician…and some of your recent comments on MR about the role of AI in Econ research as well as the (disappearing?) role of academic papers inspired this response. (It is partially but not exclusively about academia, so I hope it is ok that I’m sending it to your GMU address. Also, I’m hoping it doesn’t get flagged as spam because of the ai in the title…)
In no particular order:
-In the course of a math career, one accumulates lots of computational guesses, now one can test those with minimal effort.
-One also accumulates lots of incomplete and half formed drafts, proofs of special cases, etc, etc. Running those past claude and chatgpt can (does!) pay off. A lot of math is cleverly applying linear algebra and while I’m very good at linear algebra, I’m not as good at it as the AI’s are.
-The lower hanging fruit here are slightly off the beaten track, but not esoteric subjects. If you have a good overview of such, you can pretty quickly prod ai’s into making progress on them. (Before, you needed to have a school of grad students for that). Basic techniques (graph theory, algebra, calculus..) that ai’s are already good at can push these forward already. Making progress on truly hot topics is harder.