How It Happened
The story's protagonist has no math degree and chipped away at an old problem out of interest, using ChatGPT as an around-the-clock discussion partner: having it explain the literature, test ideas, and hint at relevant theorems, while he handled intuition and verification. The final progress was checked and held up by professional mathematicians. It's worth stressing that AI here isn't an answer machine—most of the time what it gives is a "wrong but stimulating" response, and its value is in giving an outsider what used to be available only in grad school: an on-demand sparring partner who speaks the jargon.
The Two Sides of "Vibe Maths"
The math community's reaction is intriguing. The welcoming side: math history already has a tradition of amateur contributions, and AI lowers the barrier further, enlarging the base of people who try—even at a very low success rate, a large base makes the total considerable. The worried side: the same tool will mass-produce crank submissions from people who "think they've proved the Riemann Hypothesis," and the review burden on journals and forums is already rising. These two sides are the same coin: lowering the barrier always brings good and bad together. This case falls on the good side, worth recording, and also worth not over-generalizing.
via: Hacker News