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Comments (215)

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  nritchie
  I'd like to believe Grant but I find this assault on mathematics to be dehumanizing and demoralizing. AI has destroyed a major source of "life's meaning" for many people who pursued mathematics. Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to (and many more to boot.) Not another mathematician but an alien technology. As a scientist, I don't want to end up as a laboratory assistant to an AI. I can take not being the smartest human in the room, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to spend my life serving a silicon master.
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  spawarotti
  I think math will go the way of biology. Biologists enjoy untangling the infinitely complex mechanisms of life, including the brain, and win Nobel Prizes for discoveries like "how water enters a cell," rather than "constructing the first-ever cell capable of absorbing water."No biologist has ever complained, "Gee whiz, it's so unfortunate that we already have a brain to study. It's all so meaningless! It would be so much better if we had to construct the first-ever brain from scratch."
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  anitil
  I actually remember that in an old interview (that I can't find sorry) Grant Sanderson said he moved in to YouTube because he thought it was a more promising career than being mathematician, it's interesting to see his opinion change.
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  richard_chase
  I think a lot of "mathematicians" are saddened by the sudden realization they are not even interested in it and were only in it for status and prestige. A lot of them are such pretentious tools that they willingly wasted their lives doing the absurd PhD rituals. Academia is dead.
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  cadamsdotcom
  A couple of thoughts in agreement..First, "cognitive labor" is a form of labor - it's different vs. creative work, even though both use your mind. If your math theorem can be written up in partnership with an LLM, wow! You can be done with that, and go do other great work. Cognitive labor is a form of labor. Let's talk about physical labor and leverage to understand how removing labor translates to time. On your farm you buy a tractor to replace your backhoe. If it is a hobby farm you get in the tractor and you're done super fast. Or, you can take that tractor, buy a bigger farm, and spend the same amount of time you'd have spent backhoeing, but in a far more leveraged way. You can trade removed labor for time in a way that suits you.Second; the joyful moments we get from finding generalizable abstractions and nice solutions are an adaptation. Humans can climb infinitely high conceptual hierarchies - we'll never stop climbing, using the previous ones as tools to find the next. As we do, we gain joy with each discovery because. We get so much done with brains that run on 20 watts - are we tuned to receive a neurochemical reward for finding cognitive efficiency? If AI means more concepts are discovered the tower gets taller - and we find those joyful moments more often. If there are infinite moments to be found, why not go as fast as possible!Third; everyone else is doing it, it's a baseline skill. Knowing how to work without AI is like knowing how to ride a horse. Useful and fun! Bedsides - only 150ish years ago horses were the only viable transport. Cars were new; toys for the rich. But cars got so good so fast that we eventually reconfigured whole cities. Your homework is to consider why and how horses got disrupted.New divisions are emerging in the lump of roles humans had at work. AI takes away roles from your job and lets us do more with less. That's identical to every mechanization before it. It's killing some roles that make up your work, even as it creates new ones.There's so much to be excited about. Fear is a rational response to change. But so is hope :)
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  vitalnodo
  In the essay Hackers and Painters it was mentioned that there is a project approach to learning and an academic one. The idea of pet projects is killed by language models, because what you did on weekends, a language model now does in half an hour. So you can try the other approach: maybe you should have more general knowledge right away, best practices, so more of an academic approach. In the academic approach you learn from the best reference examples, develop taste, and only then recognize what is good or bad and build your own. But here too you can see that LLMs iterate much faster, while you have to collect patterns for years, and you will also always be in the role of the one who is behind.
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  buriram
  I haven’t watched the video, but likely it hasn’t answered a question: why math? Why not physics, neuroscience, philosophy or history? People claim math is both philosophical and art, but is that a sufficiently good reason to pursue math as opposed to other careers?A lot of arguments seem to try to cling to the “old” way of doing math: staring at the blackboard for hours, wrestling with papers and papers of equations, and do forth. Well, chess players went through a similar transition period: carrying books of openings and such, to chess database, to chess engine and now AI. And at no point I hear chess players complaining that we have to study chess the old way.
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  goldylochness
  Ai will yield a higher demand for mathematicians, we need more people to understand the math being solved. We also need more people inventing math problems.People who want to solve problems themselves should go on to invent them without posting them on the internet until they're solved.
• downut
  I started grad school at math in Sept. 1995 and:"There's never been a better time to go into math" was the final statement of the ten minute orientation session from the Dep Chairman.It was a great thing to do anyway.Then.
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  nathanfig
  About a year ago I wrote something similar about software, "Now might be the best time to learn software development": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44299979Reflecting on that a year later is interesting. Agents have become REALLY good since then, and I consider the "writing code" side of my profession to be largely annihilated. Some days that's really hard to accept.But I think Grant's conclusion about math still largely echoes what I wrote about software: don't underestimate the social aspect of these activities, and if anything AI has made the social side more important. I deliberately avoided declaring, "now is the best time to learn to write code". I suspected that skill might be going out the window. But learning systems thinking and the social skills needed to connect people's dreams to reality continues to be an important art, an art I still have the privilege to practice every day.And if we do reach the "anything you can do I can do better" stage, then, as Grant said, that's a hard to imagine world, and one where "it can write really good code" might be the least of our problems.
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  zarzavat
  The award for most cope of 2026 goes to...There's never been a better time to be a professional mathematician, perhaps. Just like there's never been a better time to be a senior software engineer.An 18 year old entering university today will retire somewhere in the 2070s. Is mathematics, or software engineering, a promising career path for the next 50 years? No, it's most certainly not, and anyone suggesting otherwise is delusional. I don't know what would be a good career path, but most certainly avoid anything that AI is having the most success at in 2026.
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  gleenn
  3blue1brown has the absolute most educational and entertaining videos. Always fascinated by his animations which are custom programmed by him. I also appreciate the diversity of topics covered from deep math to software to science.
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  margorczynski
  This is the same naivete that I saw in coding some time ago before most people finally accepted there is no going back and the times of writing code by hand are gone.And the guy is not a mathematician primarily - he's a Youtube creator and entrepreneur. I liked a lot of his videos but now I usually just ask the LLM for detailed explanation and I can probe it as much as I want if something is not clear enough.Education will also take a huge hit, you can't really beat an almost free supergenius that has all the time in the world to explain something to you in as much detail as you wish.
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  mibsl
  Too early to tell, but IMO unlikely. Let's see what his take will be once an AI can propose a topic, write the script, animate, and narrate a good educational math video.
• keithnz
  I think a lot of these reactions by mathematicians are more akin to group theory than anything else. Reality is that things will naturally sort themselves out and there will be some role mathematicians play in all of it (most likely). To me it seems the timeline that some skill essentially gets retired such that if you want to keep doing it is more like "historical re-enactment" is getting quite short. Things like manually coding something is going to be a hobby. Some aspects of math are going to be a hobby, and professional math will be all about pushing up against the edge of what we can do mathematically with AI.
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  sashank_1509
  All these AI bros make me sick to my stomach. If you had a robot musician play better than you, would you then go tell a musician that this is the greatest time to be in music, all of you can now manage your army of robots, aren’t you excited, think of the massive quantities of music that can be played now, stop gatekeeping music from those who never bothered learning learning an instrument??It’s all so ridiculous. The AI boosters tactic against this is to attack your character, claiming you never liked maths, you are status driven etc etc, when the truth is they never liked doing maths, they just liked the fruits of it. You actually like doing maths, which is why you hate AI. It literally is the WORST TIME to join institutional maths if you like doing maths. Get a job in finance, management and pursue maths as a hobby instead.There is a solution to all of this, make it politically unviable to devalue human labour, which is what AI is all about, some simple political solutions that come to mind:1. It is illegal to monetize models trained on public data (force them to be released as open weight).2. A royalty payment when a model copies an art style, IP or ideas that it mined from human knowledge.3. Any IP that a model trained on public data creates is de facto invalid.If you hate what AI has done to your field, I recommend focusing your time on political solutions, just preventing construction of environmentally bad data centers is not enough and frankly the bare minimum. Move the conversation further. Prevent AI companies from profiting of the commons of human knowledge spread freely on the internet. Maybe even go as far as to ban usage of AI in certain cases, everything should be on the table, the public already hates AI, it just needs to be fanned and directed well. The worst thing you can do, is to try to gaslight yourself into believing AI has apparently made your life great.
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  tcdent
  What does it mean to "go into" math?
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  foxes
  Problem solving, critical thought, logic, creativity are always going to be valuable.In a way ai is turning programming more into maths - you write a natural language description of the problem - a proof / program - and then translating that into machine code is a lot of work / abstraction. For example look how much it takes to turn relatively simple mathematical statements into lean. That I guess is going to be the future.I would encourage everyone to learn the fundamentals still because you will need discretion and to be able to think at a more abstract level.However its funny that its only NOW dehumanising/demoralising now when its white people losing jobs to the capitalist machine in the imperial core, and not the slave silicon miners making gpus for gamers.
• anon
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  caaqil
  In other news, there's never been a better time to be a software developer. Come to think of it, there's also never been a better time to invest in learning copy-editing and proof-reading as a side hustle. It's a Brave New World. Everything is fine, the demand just got expanded, the pie got bigger, nothing more. New doors will be opened, nothing has changed; in fact, everything improved. Stochastic parrots are no match for our carbon-based g.
• globalnode
  I respect Grant for doing things his way and in this video making an earnest attempt to analyse the situation from many perspectives. Well done.
• erratum_hunter
  This may be true for math educators, but not so much for math researchers.
• whattheheckheck
  People with money will have questions and people or machines will need to give answers to satisfy them.
• anon
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• CurbStomper4
  [dead]
• keel-control
  denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance
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  PixelForg
  A comment on the video that resonated with me> I feel like the point is still being missed, and it's very similar to the way software engineers are trying to cope. The argument you are making "Well yes now this part of math we will not need to do again, but now we can do this instead" however the issue with most people just don't want to do that....> Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.> Imagine a leather workman who's life passion is making insanely high quality handbags, who takes joy in knowing everything he touches will last someone a lifetime and give them joy everytime they use it. And then not gradually, but almost overnight someone comes to his door and tells him we can make bags 50 times better than you at 1/tenth the price. But don't you worry, you can make more money overseeing the factory, or selling people on how good this bag is, and explaining that to them.> I mean, ok, that just is not what I wanted to do with my life. I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to be a salesman, I never wanted to be a writer. A craft I enjoy doing has been taken away from me, I should be allowed to mourn, I don't care that I can do something else since I never liked doing it in the first place. I enjoyed solving problems and writing code, I don't care if people say "well thats never what programming was about it was actually about becoming a manager all along" I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to manage, I never wanted to be a proof reader.