Mathematician jokes AI papers are the new Collatz: he'll never finish reading anything
AlexKontorovich · x · 2026-10-07
Mathematician Alex Kontorovich revives the old joke that Collatz was a Soviet plot to derail US math — anyone who touches it drops everything. He now feels the same about AI: mid-digest of a positive-proportion Collatz result, he got pulled into quasi-RH, and something even more impactful will land next. His half-joking worry: in the AI era, will researchers ever finish reading and digesting anything?
More from AGI Musings
- Design panel: what early-stage founders should build while models change weekly — pxd · 2026-10-07
- Consumer AI Winners Exist Only in Search, Productivity and Creative Tools—Everything Else Is Open — omooretweets · 2026-10-07
- 'Computer' was a job that vanished — AI will make 2000s computer use feel equally alien — sterlingcrispin · 2026-10-07
- GMU NLP simulates 10k LLM agents with memory and social networks moving through San Francisco for a week — ZiyuYao · 2026-10-07
- OpenAI nukes your research, you rewrite your project in Rust: 'a jobs program for ourselves' — almmaasoglu · 2026-10-07
- Dario Amodei's 2016 AI safety paper resurfaces: thinking about safety pre-Transformer — bookwormengr · 2026-10-07