Scholar Slams Massive Duplicative AI Labor: Marginal Value Worth Only Token Cost
littmath · x · 2026-08-12
Daniel Litt criticizes the massive waste of resources caused by AI in mathematical research. He points out that a huge amount of duplicative labor, both human and machine, is being devoted to work whose marginal value to mathematics is essentially zero.
He argues that the actual value of these studies is merely the cost of the tokens consumed, plus a few bits of information indicating that existing models can solve the problem.
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