One of the proofs that OpenAI announced yesterday is for a major open problem in the field I'm working in. I tried to read it but it was a completely incomprehensible 100+ page output. I guess the community has to do all the dirty work of figuring out any sort of understanding. (I had known about the results weeks in advance before their official announcement. There is a bunch of more drama there that I won't get into.) Putting aside the serious possibility of Lean bugs, a lot of people don't realize that there is ultimately no point in having a machine just generate Lean blobs endlessly. The reality is that mathematicians have always done math for the sake of enjoyment or understanding, and math contributes to society by improving understanding. Still, I am worried about the convenient social arrangement that allowed many mathematicians to do this for a modest living.

Anyway, I'm sure it was a good idea to apply the full might of capital for pure math problems, instead of less important social issues like climate change. We even got a more efficient discrete Fourier transform, improved from O(n log n) to, I shit you not, O(n (log n)^0.9999999999999)).

Edit: Here is an article by Quanta which I think accurately describes the situation that mathematicians are going through right now: https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-the-end-of-math-as-we-know-it-20261005/