Comment by Someone
But abstract mathematics doesn’t care about solutions to problems; it cares about understanding problem spaces. I do not think current AI helps with that.
Problems like the one discussed also aren’t interesting to applied mathematicians, either, because of lack of applications.
But yes, if this kind of AI produces new materials, solves diseases, etc. they will be very useful. We wouldn’t care whether they arrived at those solutions through valid reasoning, though. A sloppy AI that has better ‘guesses/intuitions’ than humans or that can guess and check ‘guesses/intuitions' for correctness faster would be very useful.
And engineers don’t care about abstract mathematics: we care about math that solves problems. Being able to solve more problems with less human-years of effort is a big win.