The end of the age of heroes - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
Noahpinion
SubscribeSign in
The end of the age of heroes<br>AI will soon be better at math than any human. What does that mean?
Noah Smith<br>Aug 04, 2026
221
14<br>15
Share
Photo by iSawRed on Unsplash<br>I had a great-uncle who was a “human calculator”. It’s an odd, rare ability that allows people to multiply large numbers quickly in their heads. I remember using a hand calculator and seeing if my uncle could get it right without a tool faster than I could; more often than not, he could.<br>Human calculators used to be very valuable as employees, back when calculation was done by hand. Today they’re just a curiosity. Technology came along and superseded that particular human ability, as it has so many others. The story of John Henry being superseded by the steam drill, or Paul Bunyan by the chainsaw, is a metaphor for the march of progress. In some cases, like Garry Kasparov or Lee Sedol losing to computers at chess and Go, the moment really happened.<br>This week marked another important such moment in the history of man versus machine. OpenAI announced that its new model, Astra, managed to solve ten major outstanding problems in math and theoretical computer science. Here’s a simple explanation of the problems. The general consensus seems to be that these are extremely important, stunning breakthroughs.<br>This does not mean that computers are now capable of doing every kind of math better than humans can. Some people have argued that AI is good at results where the solution can be found by reading the entire literature and combining existing insights — exactly the kind of thing you might expect a computer to be superhuman at — but still not as good as humans at making truly novel leaps of insight. This may represent a real, general limitation of LLMs’ capabilities — as Tom Zahavy of Google DeepMind put it, it may still be the case that “LLMs can’t jump.”<br>But the trend line is becoming clearer. The University of Toronto’s Daniel Litt, one of the most prominent skeptics of AI’s potential for frontier math research, recently conceded a major bet about what AI could do:
Daniel Litt@littmath
Incidentally I am conceding this bet. Strictly speaking it hasn’t resolved (I think we’ve yet to see an Annals-quality number theory paper) but it’s clear I was wrong about what capabilities were necessary to produce one, and it’s just a matter of time.
Tamay Besiroglu @tamaybes
I bet @littmath that in 5 years AI will be able to produce Annals-quality Number Theory papers at an inference budget at or below $100k/paper, at 3:1 odds in my favor.
1:54 AM · Aug 2, 2026 · 403K Views
59 Replies · 194 Reposts · 3.17K Likes
Litt appears to no longer believe that there is any important type of math that AI won’t soon be able to do, writing: “The models don’t yet seem able to do certain kinds of high quality research, but I also expect this is a matter of (not too much) time.”<br>Some mathematicians have reacted to this development with despair. Kirwin Hampshire’s post is probably the most evocative and the most well-read:<br>Ossuary Lost at Sea<br>The Dark Night of Mathematics
I am going insane. During the last week or so LLMs have produced a number of counterexamples to significant long-standing conjectures. I will not recount these happenings here, there are many places where you can find the details…<br>Read more<br>10 days ago · 1148 likes · 361 comments · Kirwin Hampshire
He writes:<br>I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments. I have been screaming internally for days. It feels as though I am living inside of a nightmare…For me, the affective quality of learning mathematics is empathetically tethered to an act of discovery and creation…If The Library of Babel existed, would authors continue to write books?…<br>Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you this, but my aim is to be open: These developments have triggered some deranged thoughts in me. I have wondered if it is the express goal of these companies to make me kill myself…The story of human discovery and the triumph of the human spirit will soon be excised from this discipline…[T]he process of prompting novel proofs will be as auraless as ordering doordash. Watch as magic and mystery evaporate. Watch as the sun sets on our heroic age…<br>There is nothing I can do. There may be nothing you can do. I have no prescriptions, policy recommendations, or coherent call to action. I just want to be honest and open about my emotional and spiritual response. I want to feel seen….I need the architects of our new mathematical paradigm to look me in the eye and acknowledge our shared humanity and soul before they deliver the coup de grâce.
Math PhD student Tasmin Chu, meanwhile, urges a more confrontational path, calling on mathematicians to avoid working with AI companies and to aggressively preserve the way that math research is currently done. This seems extremely unlikely (and would fail if it were attempted), but it demonstrates...