The irony is that I kind of agree with Sabine Sabine Hossenfelder that most academic research is BS, even in math. This is one of the (many) reasons why I left academia. Yet her economic analysis is dead-wrong, and public funding of mathematical research is wise, justified and cost-effective🧵

As an applied mathematician, I tend to think of these as a mismatch between the model -- maths -- and the phenomena it was built to capture. Therefore focusing our efforts on them is a form of overfitting, but math leaves us no choice in general...

Just tested this model on a few challenging math questions and I found it very helpful. Magistral keeps doubting its answers ("wait, but...") & trying to improve them, which makes it great at exploring & exploiting knowledge from its train data (and it's fast). Congrats Mistral !

Big thanks to the COLT 2025 organizers for an awesome event in Lyon! Here are the slides from my keynote this morning in case you’re curious about the references I mentioned: di.ens.fr/~fbach/fbach_o…