@tao@mathstodon.xyz Evidently, AI's solution of valuable open problems in mathematics is not for mathematicians; the eventual audience for this effort is those (companies) who are willing and able to pay to "employ" such AI in their "workforce". A dynamic that causes academic inflation - people getting more advanced degrees to give themselves a competitive edge in being hired to work for a company, rather than the desire for more advanced work in the field - seems identical to the one incentivising the present AI dynamic. One measure to alleviate this is a value-proposition favouring the eco-system of mathematics. The effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, for instance, needed the value-propositions of the information economy and geopolitics to incent against using dead dinosaurs; not just accounts of harmed natural ecosystems. A temporary value-proposition candidate seems to arise from AI needing to learn from ongoing mathematical work even to flatten the mathematical landscape: if a consortium of mathematicians can be funded to develop a culture around efficient use of AI to solve research problems for the industry, it offers an alternative to companies that will otherwise only have the leading AI providers as options in the limit. It makes the argument that AI doesn't need to risk turning the eternally renewable resource of (human) mathematical creativity into a limited one by zero-sum behaviour; that it can instead sustainably accelerate such creativity in a way that is also more profitable. This "appeal to application" may make the likes of G.H. Hardy (and you?) wince, but perhaps less so than the present situation.