Litt: AI acts as a Google substitute without doing deep intellectual math work
Daniel Litt · Can AI Learn Mathematical Intuition? · Sep 1, 2026 · at 19:03
Daniel Litt, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Toronto, describes how frontier AI models fit into his daily mathematical research workflow.
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“What I've found is that the projects that I have that kind of predate AI, like the projects I've been thinking about for three or four or five years it's just not that useful. Like, it's primarily kind of a substitute for Google or something. Like, I might use it to, like, learn about some related topic or, like, something where I would have earlier Googled something and then, like, read a paper. Like, maybe I'll discuss it with AI instead. So it saves some time, for sure. It's, like, not really doing deep intellectual work for me.”
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