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AI unlocks Gödel's notebooks, said to contain hundreds of proved theorems

120 points bookofjoe 1 hour ago 14 comments

2aFds 45 minutes ago | parent

Nice timing for the IPO. Cooked Nvidia numbers on the 17th are still missing, and the 19th will go well!

The AI was of course trained on existing pre-AI transcriptions of Goedel's shorthand, which he was taught in school around 1920 and which was widespread and only technically "obsolete".

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-67606-3

ducttapecrown 45 minutes ago | parent

It'd be interesting to hear about these new 14 themes of logic Gödel pursued!

semolinapudding 37 minutes ago | parent

This is incredibly exciting! Gödel is unquestionably the most important logician in history, but unfortunately he published very little. For instance, the Dialectica interpretation was published approximately 20 years after his first ideas on the subject.

Plus, Jan von Plato is the world's leading expert on Gödel -- the number of people who can read Gödel's handwriting can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and I think that every single one is part of Jan von Plato's research group. If he is excited about the output, this is a huge deal.

empath75 34 minutes ago | parent

https://aitp-conference.org/2026/slides/JvP.pdf this seems to be slide deck with some of the results.

superjan 12 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

cyanydeez 34 minutes ago | parent

I think we'll find godel's most pungent critiques of modern logic & mathmatics to be the maddening limits of LLMs.

LdBaringSwallow 13 minutes ago | parent

Why? His incompleteness work explains why software and math suck so he would already expect them to; they're rhetorical and can never fully be a closed loop body of knowledge as we can never with rhetoric concretely observe/define the far future or far past; merely simulate rhetorically

Ergo all defined axiomatic systems have sentences about the far past and future that cannot be defined in those languages with certainty. Most do not make the connection to physics. Gödel did and would 100% aware the limits exist and will always exist

Scaling laws aren't just for computers; humans lived experience does not scale infinitely through time, just approximately 2-3 generations

As I understand immutable physical truth like this played a huge role in his early research and ultimately were the forcing function that led him to incompleteness

sheikhnbake 28 minutes ago | parent

This might be an actual concrete example of someone making themselves obsolete with AI.

> Von Plato said he had started his Gödel project in 2017 because he was facing mandatory retirement from Helsinki University. “What should I do to make myself indispensable? Oh yes, I’ll start reading Gödel’s enigmatic shorthand pages!” He received a €2.5m (£2.1m) grant from the European Research Council, taught himself Gabelsberger shorthand – “I am one of only six people who can read it in the world” – and assembled a small team.

alterom 17 minutes ago | parent

It's literally an example of someone keeping themselves from becoming obsolete with AI.

alterom 18 minutes ago | parent

"You don't get credit for the work you don't tell anybody about"

This has been a problem long before Godel: famously, Newton tried to get credit for inventing Calculus only after Leibniz published his work, leading to a bitter dispute that lasted long after they both died.

I wonder if this problem is now going to be significantly exacerbated by AI, as mathematicians are getting more incentives to keep their works secret —

— or, to the contrary, the community will get a push to publish incomplete ideas, scratch work, etc. early to establish a record of thinking about a problem before others did.

In the end, as always, it's a social problem created by " publish or perish " institutional incentives which reward (and require!) published results, but not the work that led to to them.

This, I hope, will finally change.

imbiased 6 minutes ago | parent

I can't remember the exact quote but I believe I read that Gödel confided to Einstein (in their walks in Princeton) on his deep worry of his work being forgotten. If only he knew.