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0 pointsslibhb1mo ago0 comments

> I see this happening in the enterprise. People delegate work to some LLM; work isn't always bad, sometimes it's even acceptable. But it's not their work, and as a result, the author doesn't know or understand it better than anyone else! They don't own it, they can't explain it. They literally have no value whatsoever; they're a passthrough; they're invisible.

According to the blog post linked in the OP, the LLM-generated results were read, understood, and confirmed by the mathematician whose work they built on.

I notice a dichotomy here between people who care about results and people who care about process. The former group wants to use LLMs insofar as they can contribute to getting results. The latter group is wary of LLMs because they're more interested in the process and less interested in the results themselves. Needless to say, I think the former group is right, and I'm happy to see that mathematicians (or some of them) agree.

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sillyfluke1mo ago· 1 in thread

I think you are misunderstanding the parent's comment.

>the LLM-generated results were read, understood, and confirmed by the mathematician whose work they built on.

The mathematician and the blog author are not the same person (as you seem to understand). Nathanson (the mathematician) is the one who is the expert verifier. He is the person who has the higher value and won't be fired in some hypothetical.

>>They don't own it, they can't explain it. They literally have no value whatsoever; they're a passthrough; they're invisible.

This is the blog author in the parent's description. If their boss asks them what they need to prove that the AI is more than capable in this domain and the author tells their boss they need Nathanson (the mathematician) to verify the results, his boss will thank him for demonstrating the AI's capability in this domain, fire him, pass his prompt history to Nathanson, and keep Nathanson on the job (the expert verifier).

Which is the parent's point after all, because he's referring to the hypothetical job security of the blog author not the mathematician.

jmillikin1mo ago

  > The mathematician and the blog author are not the same person
  > (as you seem to understand). Nathanson (the mathematician) is
  > the one who is the expert verifier. He is the person who has
  > the higher value and won't be fired in some hypothetical.

The article's author is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Gowers

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