A new group photo on the banks of Loiret ☀️

My prediction from last summer was that the number of frontier AI models getting a gold medal at this summer’s IMO will be… zero! The reason is that they won’t bother to compete, it’ll simply be beneath them. If anyone can now push a button on Codex / Claude Code and get a perfect score, what’s the point? No, they’ll just leave the 17 year olds to take the test on their own. (The open source models will still compete for another year or so. That’s my guess!) Similarly, I think the labs pushing “research math” is also a fad that will expire soon enough. Think about it. GPT solved a major problem (Erdos unit distance); what they’re not reporting is the 1000 other problems they attacked and failed to make progress. [That’s not exactly deception; I also don’t report the dozens of things I tried to prove and failed…] They’re also not reporting the millions of dollars all of this cost them, and for what? Right now the “for what” is advertising: they’re signaling that they’re the best model for math, so you should use them for whatever your reasoning task is. Math departments also spend millions of dollars and produce theorems, but that is their actual end goal. A tech company is happy with a million-dollar theorem only if it predicts a billion-dollar application somewhere else. Once the bubble bursts, investors will want “real” applications from AI, new drugs, self driving / flying cars, etc etc. Nobody will care that the systems are also useful at proving theorems. Nobody but us mathematicians. So like the IMO, I think the frontier labs will get bored of theorems, and will leave us humans alone to keep doing math (and they’ll give us an amazing tool with which to do it!). Does that make sense? What do you think?

Read this thoughtful, interesting, but also somewhat 'annoying' essay yesterday, and had some thoughts, which I wrote down here msuskiewicz.github.io/blog/

This thread highlights what I fear will be the degradation of human knowledge due to AI. If I were being charitable, I would say that here Gemini is playing a hybrid role of textbook and tutor, where your tutor has a photographic memory and world class speed reading abilities, but might not be smart enough to get that PhD. So sure, access to that type of tutor is infinitely better than reading baby Rudin in a vacuum. But there is no way AI here is replacing Rudin. Unfortunately though, to a lot of people, it gives the illusion of being better while actually being worse. And thus people will think they are learning more when they are actually learning less.

Triple Self-Portrait. 1960. Norman Rockwell.

Our recent article in Journal of Molecular Biology explores how Post-Translational Modifications (PTMs) orchestrate the repair of trapped Topoisomerase-induced DNA breaks via TDP1 and TDP2. sciencedirect.com/.../pii/S0… @iacskolkata @IndiaDST @ICMRDELHI @DBTIndia

My brilliant friend @MartinLukacisin started his own systems biology lab and is looking for a PhD student or postdoc. Highly recommended!

I’m happy to share our recent manuscript in which we are structurally and biochemically investigating 3'-5' tRNA splicing ligases, including a #cryoEM structure of the five-subunit D. rerio tRNA ligase complex. jbc.org/article/S0021-9258(2…

PhD position with our neighbours - a friendly team working on mRNA: abg.asso.fr/fr/candidatOffre…

Thèse en glycochimie disponible dans notre équipe @ICOA_UMR7311 @Univ_Orleans @CNRSchimie @AgenceRecherche Si vous êtes intéressés, merci de postuler via le portail ADUM à cette adresse : collegedoctoral-cvl.fr/as/ed…

Excited to share our latest on RNA polymerase I termination. Fantastic collaboration with @EPetfalski @MarieWinz @DTollervey online today in @CellReports cell.com/cell-reports/fullte… #DNA #RNA @IBBPAS Read next tweets to check out our key findings