How are they cheaper? Your average grant where I am can pay for a couple of PhD students. I could afford to pay for inference costs out of my own salary, no grant needed. Completely different economic scales here. I like students better of course, but funding is drying up these days.

And now you're belittling me. Yeah, good one, that'll convince people.

> out of control chatbot that can't comprehend basic arguments

I don't see how it is out of control. It is a tool. It is being used for a job. For low-level jobs it often succeeds. For tougher jobs, it is succeeding sufficiently often to be interesting. I don't care if it understands worldview semantics, that's for humans to do.

> we've spent trillions collectively on ai

The economics around AI do not suggest that continuing to perform large training runs is sustainable. That's also not relevant to the discussion. Once the training is done, further costs are purely on inference, and that is the comparison I was making.

> Inference costs are heavily subsidised

Even if you pay to run inference on your own hardware, economics of scale dictate that it is still cheaper than students.

> It's been active research but the problem estimates only 5-10 people are even aware that it is a problem.

That sounds about right for most pure math problems. Were you expecting more?

Let's not pretend that society would have invested that kind of money into pure mathematics research. It is extraordinarily difficult to get funding for that kind of work in most parts of the world. Mathematicians are relatively cheap, yes, but the money coming into AI was from blind VCs with a sense of grandeur. It wasn't to do maths research. If it's here anyway, and causing nightmares for actually teaching new students, may as well try to make some good of it. It has only recently crossed the edge of being useful. Most researchers I know are only now starting to consider it, mostly as a search engine, but some for proof assistance. Experiences a year ago were highly negative. They're a lot more positive now.

I'm trying to give a perspective from someone who actually does do math research at a senior level, who actually does have a half dozen math PhD students to supervise, to say that your blind attitude toward this is not sensible or helpful. Your comments about the problem being trivial do belittle the actual effort people have put into the problem without success. If they could easily have discovered this without AI, they would have already done so. Researchers do not have unlimited time and there are many more problems than students, especially good ones (hence my random comment).

Source? This sounds like hyperbole. The entire US GDP is low tens of trillions.