On the other hand, frontier math (pun intended) is much worse financed than biomedicine because most of the PhD-level math has barely any practical applications worth spending many manhours of high-IQ mathematicians (which often makes them switch career, you know). So, I would argue, if productivity of math postdocs when armed with future LLMs raises by, let’s say, an order of magnitude, they will be able to attack more laborious problems.
Not that I expect it to make much difference to the general populace or even the scientific community at large though
When general readers see “empirical data bottlenecks” they expect something like a couple times better resolution or several times higher energy. But when physicists mention “wildly beyond limitations” they mean orders of magnitude more!
I looked up the actual numbers:
in this particular case we need to approach the Planck energy, which is 1.2×1028 eV, Wolfram Alpha readily suggests it’s ~540 kWh, 0.6 of energy use of a standard clothes dryer or 1.3 of energy in a typical lightning bolt; I also calculated it’s about 1.2 of the muzzle energy of the heaviest artillery piece in history, the 800-mm Schwerer Gustav;
LHC works in the 1013 eV range; 14 TeV, according to WA, can be compared to about an order of magnitude above the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito;
the highest energy observed in cosmic rays is 3×1020 eV or 50 J; for comparison, air and paintball guns muzzle energy is around 10 J while nail guns start from around 90 J.
So in this case we are looking at the difference between an unsafely powerful paintball marker and the most powerful artillery weapon humanity ever made (TBH I didn’t expect this last week, which is why I wrote “near-future”)