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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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I suppose the snark is aimed at me. So I guess I'll start with the snark right back, first. My comment included multiple very hopeful things, and a big part of that was due to the linked post's discussion of Alethia's performance on First Proof, which you would have known if you had read either of them. This now is just the ArXiV version of it.

I am still quite very hopeful, and it's nice to see the actual proofs that were generated. It is quite unfortunate that I can't beat on the system with my own problems to get a personal feel for it. I also endorse pretty much everything @PokerPirate has said below up to this point.

Obvious remaining concerns are obvious. It still generated wrong proofs, when evaluated by experts. Many many many hours of evaluation work. That can plausibly be managed; wrong proofs are definitely out there. I will repeat my related concern that the ballgame is quite different when you're working on a problem where you don't already have a solution (that is, where you don't know that a solution exists). And as you mention, cost, question mark? They're unclear about it, and what they do have looks scary, especially if you look at the numbers floating around in their prior papers (also untethered from an absolute scale, but wild in a relative scale).