korrents

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Requiem for a Field?

Peter Woit · 26 Jul 2026 · math.columbia.edu

3 korrents from this piece

Peter Woit did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. So far I haven't seen AI agents doing anything new and important that I would care about, but maybe that's just a matter of time...
  2. in an intellectually dead field, AI will just produce worthless junk. If what you feed it is decades of complicated and meaningless computations, it will just produce even more complicated and meaningless ones.
  3. The results have surprised me: these things are a lot more capable than I had expected.