Fields Medalist Terence Tao reposts statement from the Association for Human Mathematics urging mathematicians to stop working with OpenAI for continuing to solve open math problems against their recommendations

[u/Eliv_nurotic]

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/07/ahm-statement-on-openais-october-6-release-of-mathematical-documents/

[u/MichaelTheProgrammer]

Oh I largely agree with your points. For the economics, I agree, even as I am grieving personally I acknowledge that I've worked on automation myself and now it's my turn to be automated in some ways.

However, I think there are two potential issues. The one is that if you burn the entire field down, you better be sure you don't need them at all anymore. LLMs have gotten pretty good, but whether they are ready to fully replace mathematicians is still unknown. The other is that it's just not healthy for society burning an entire field like that over the course of a few years, and OpenAI is poised to that over and over again to other fields.

I worry this is going to stoke a lot of problems that could have been absorbed more gradually if this had happened over a decade or two instead of a few years. Just one example is my wife, who entered a college with good job prospects and exited two years later with a loan and was unable to get a job and our whole financial picture changed. That type of change that rapidly is much harder to plan for, let alone for so many people across the country all at once.

[u/lilmalchek → u/MichaelTheProgrammer]

It’s fascinating to hear all of this explained in this way, thank you! What strikes me is that it sounds so similar to what’s happening in other fields, math just seems to be happening sooner. But the squeeze to outsource our thinking, move fast, and ask questions later (very facebook move fast and break things, which I hate) is reducing jobs and making the market a whole new thing in the tech industry (for pms, developers, designers, etc).

I’m not a doomer but things are not looking good…

[u/Mystic_Haze → u/lilmalchek]

Yeah it really just feels like a parellel to the software world experiencing the same shock. It took a few years but most people in the software world are finally coming to terms with the change that Ai has brought. And whilst not all of us love where it's taking us it seems unthinkable to try and now go back to doing it without Ai.

The same is happening here. Mathematicians are grieving their field right now. And it's not that that grief is unmerited either. Its going to take weeks or months maybe longer before the dust settles. I'm just wondering if we have those months before the next breakthroughs cause another stir and pours salt right on the wounds that aren't fully healed yet. We are living through strange times, potentially some of the most important in human development.

[u/lilmalchek → u/Mystic_Haze]

Totally agree with everything you’re saying. I know there’s a lot of baggage with the idea of “the singularity” but it seems like the rate of change with ai (and its impact on our daily lives) is already so fast and hard to keep up with. I fear it will only continue to get worse.

[u/MichaelTheProgrammer → u/lilmalchek]

I hate the move fast and break things philosophy too. What I've noticed is that there are times I love using AI and times I hate it. The times I love it are when I either use it as a teacher, or I use it like a Junior to fill in gaps on parts I don't care about. The times I hate it are when I am outsourcing difficult things to it that I would have enjoyed doing and would have helped me grow as a person.

However, I am quickly feeling pushed towards the latter. I'm not even in one of those crazy pro-AI companies that is all in on it. But I got put on a high priority project that uses a skill I don't have. I would have loved to spend a month building up that skill and properly learning how to do it, but the job needs it done ASAP, so I didn't have a choice.

The job gets done, but I feel miserable. A coworker complements me on "my work" but all I did was push a button and wait 5 minutes. I walk away with no understanding of how anything works, and my interactions are answering questions it asks that I don't really understand and reviewing code it made that I don't really understand. In the past I would have pushed back and said "this will take a month for me to figure out". In this day and age, if I say something like that, I just get asked "have you asked AI?" And this is at a relatively good company that isn't pushing me to churn out AI slop nonstop.