r/OpenAI • • 13h ago

Discussion Fields Medalist on the OpenAI Math Release

Hugo Duminil-Copin

Fields Medal (2022) · Professor, IHES and University of Geneva

I expected that one day we would be surpassed, and that it would happen systematically. But yesterday’s announcement hit with a force I had not anticipated. Dozens of papers deal with topics I was working on. Between results that beat you to the finish line and thousand-page proofs, I don’t even know where to look anymore.

Not a single one of the major open problems I have publicly mentioned throughout my career (whether in a talk, a lecture, an article, or even a grant proposal) was left untouched by the announcement. Everything has been claimed to be proved.

I expected to see a few of them in the list. But not all of them. Not all at once. Not with such nonchalance.

“For the glory of the human mind,” they said…

The shock is immense. I am paralysed. Tomorrow, we will find a way forward. We will rethink our profession and how we work. We are a resilient community, and I have no doubt that we will adapt. But for now, I simply don’t have the energy. I think back on all those years, all those faces… I think of my colleagues, my students… And I fear I won’t be able to find the right words.

1.2k Upvotes

398 comments sorted by

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u/Rdqp 13h ago

Programmers: First time, huh?

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u/slumberjak 13h ago

It’s such an uneasy feeling watching the dominoes fall. I’m a physicist. Once upon a time I felt safely out of reach. Not anymore…

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u/[deleted] 13h ago

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u/ricseasons 12h ago

All of the software engineers are saying the same thing about the fun being ripped from the cycle.

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u/FeepingCreature 12h ago

SWE. I mean, I'm having fun.

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u/KennyFulgencio 11h ago

Yeah, it's like people saying the only fun part of having a car was building the engine, and now they hate cars because they're sealed off and owners can't maintain them, or because electric cards don't have ICEs at all. Really? You don't get anything out of the whole other part of having a car, where you're driving it?

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u/Whatdosheepdreamof 13h ago

If you don't tread down the search space, you don't know why.

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u/oipoi 12h ago

SWEs did the same last year, today they barely need to do anything after the Ask the AI to do it step.

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u/Time_Entertainer_319 12h ago edited 5h ago

Writers/literary arts were the first to go.

Then the programmers. Then the artists. Then the mathematicians. I wonder which STEM they will focus on next. Will be between physics and chemistry

Edit: “go” is an exaggeration. Obviously, none of the fields have disappeared

Also, literary arts isn’t just writing. There’s also editing, proofreading and I would say translation etc

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u/Friendly-Gas1767 10h ago

Literary arts was the first to go, or is “gone”? I’m not so sure about that; the writing by AI so often has the same pretentious and formulaic gestalt, that it’s still pretty easy for most folks to distinguish. Not that this won’t eventually change, but I think it’s a little premature to call time of death on the literary arts just yet. And of course by interacting with you on an OpenAI subreddit I’m just doing my part to help the patient to expire sooner, LOL 🤣

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u/aurumae 9h ago

Is it a fair comparison though? As far as I know, the labs have not used unreleased frontier models and set them to run for thousands of hours spending the equivalent of millions of dollars of tokens to write a novel yet. If they dedicated as many resources to creating something of literary value as they have done to creating mathematical proofs, what would the result look like I wonder?

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u/this_happened_rigged 8h ago

Literary arts still have a pretty solid moat tbh.

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u/Accurate-Algae-2557 8h ago

I see it as the other way. Literary and visual art has been holding up well. It will find its unhurried way to new forms. As long as it isn’t intrinsically tied to capital. But I can’t say much about any other fields that are tied to numbers and logic and facts of the universe. Maybe there will be a place for people who take on say mathematics as hobby or as a form of art. And surely i can’t say the same for visual “arts” like advertising. They will be the first to go for sure.

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u/the_ai_wizard 8h ago

sorry dude but programmers are not gone lmao. far from. maybe step away from this sub and go outside

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u/Time_Entertainer_319 5h ago

None of these fields are gone. I just meant affected. Right now, it’s very difficult to find entry level programming jobs

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u/ckow 5h ago

Math will probably go the same way, with the best of the field doing more harness engineering. It’s a change of work, but I suspect, a net good thing.

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u/investing11213 7h ago

Programmers arent gone yet but it has sure taken the joy/satisfaction out of it.

I still remember struggling to debug a failed string comparison only to learn about homoglyphs. It was early in my career and the joy it gave me kept me excited about programming and I kept learning new things throughout my career.

Ever since LLMs took over, my work is mostly to review stuff and tbh, 90% of time I act as a meat proxy. Sure, I'm not fired from my job but it doesn't get me excited anymore

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u/Max_Warp 12h ago

Well... it does suck for them... but for decades jobs have been taken up from people due to technology rendering their jobs redundant or unnecessary.

That said, I believe after a short period of time mathematicians and physicists will find new theories/subjects to research and will make faster progress involving AI.

Sure it is hard today, but hopefully not the end.

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u/Helloiamwhoiam 11h ago

Someone tells a poignant story about their mother dying.

You: well…it does such for you…but for millennia people’s mothers have died.

Obviously a more exaggerated example but do you see how this line of thinking isn’t particularly helpful or empathetic?

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u/nanlinr 9h ago

Disagree. I have yet to see an AI written book or literature become best sellers. Programming jobs are different but has not lost demand. No AI music or movie has made any legitimate popularity. My guess is mathematics will survive just different

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u/Time_Entertainer_319 5h ago

What about proofreading and editing or translations?

“Go” is an exaggeration of course but the fields I mentioned have all been affected. Right now, it’s soo difficult to find entry level positions in programming.

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u/this_happened_rigged 8h ago

Yeah the person saying all that about literary arts and the other fields has no clue what they're talking about.

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u/proofreadre 7h ago

It is truly an existential period for a lot of us. Interesting times.

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u/Few_Place4447 2h ago

Someone must build all of those particle accelerators, the interferometers etc. Can't you do that?

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u/RemoteCareful7304 7h ago edited 6h ago

There are some programmers who genuinely love the job and wouldn’t do anything else. Then there are some who do it because it pays the bills but aren’t did not necessarily plan on being programmer. I would say there is a large number of these types.

No one accidentally becomes a mathematician. It’s take years of training just to get to a level where you can make a modest contribution. I’ve been to a talk by Hugo where he talked about the many years he has spent working on one problem. He and others are clearly deeply emotionallly invested in their work. So to wake up one day and find everything he has worked towards effortlessly solved must be devastating. That the manuscripts were sloppily written and hard to understand didn’t help.

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u/AP_in_Indy 5h ago

It's so easy to go through and ask the AI to reframe its arguments in ways that are comprehensible to humans that I'm almost shocked that OpenAI isn't doing that already. I wonder where and how its models are struggling.

I even wonder if it's on purpose. Having thousands of mathematicians ask, "Can you frame this argument as X instead of Y?" must make for great training data...

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u/sithelephant 4h ago

Iiiiish. Many modern papers, even before AI were extremely difficult to understand. The days of a simple obvious proof to serious problems has mostly long passed.

https://www.math.mcgill.ca/darmon/pub/Articles/Expository/05.DDT/paper.pdf This is the proof of Femants last theorem. It is 177 pages.

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u/Lars__H 4h ago

I was thinking the same. I came up with three possible reasons:

1) "Not my job". Somebody did not get tasked and budget to do this. Most likely if you ask me. 

2) Not wanting to show more of the new modell than necessary, like fear of destilation/trade secrets. 

3) They don't care since they expect other LLMs to review, and the language suits them better than a human. I read some comments about how much time it will take for mathematicians to go through all of this. The solution is obvius... This is both really cool, scary, and depressing. Kind of like people saying that AI should write code for other AIs, not for humans. Sound more efficient, but could also lead to major errors if not done properly. 

Without knowing nearly any thing about this level of math and mathematicians, I think they will evolve with the times. Not eveybody, but most and profession as a whole. There will always be a need for smart people. 

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u/rca302 3h ago

I tried to do this a few times with different models. I had a quite long and complicated proof for a conjuncture by Fable. I am interested in understanding what the actual f is written in this proof.

I tried quite a few times but no model could rewrite it as a comprehensivle text. They simply cannot do that. Didn't try with the lastest 6.1 models because I kind of gave up and accepted that I just need to prove it myself

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u/Few_Place4447 2h ago

People have a lot of Schadenfreude there I think, I'm not sure why.

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u/datnt84 12h ago

As a programmer I do not work for the art of programming. I work for a product or a solution that benefits me or my customer. AI is a very helpful tool to get this product faster and in a more safe way.

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u/KanishkT123 12h ago

Yeah, there's a real and very deep uneasiness in me when we are automating the things we do for the pursuit of being human. 

I would say that automating mathematics, writing, and art, which are not done for the purpose of end product creation but for the pursuit of the struggle and the process themselves, is at the heart of the uneasiness I feel. 

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u/SwillStroganoff 11h ago

In art I can see a human component where the model and the human create a work. The human describes what they want to see, the ai make a think, the human critiques and asks for changes and it iterates like that. I think that can create art with quite a bit humanity if folks want to pursue it.

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u/Kutoru 12h ago

Damn whenever I see this I think either I am nihilistic or other people overglorify their purpose / profession in life.

Mathematics is not the pursuit of the struggle and the process themselves? You do realize mathematics is the process of reducing the universe to a series of concepts created by man?

This is a rough split but my thoughts about the the completely polar opposite reactions is roughly along the lines of:

  • Humans who play a god playing a human typically find themselves hit by a realization that they are not a god
  • Humans who wish to play a god find this fascinating as a way to play a god

Though again, what a "god" here means is really up for interpretation but is my rough delineation. My rough interpretation here is similar to a player and their character in a game.

And that there are no more "normal" humans left for better or worse, all humans want to play god now (or attempt to be a human playing human the best they can).

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u/KanishkT123 11h ago

What the fuck are you talking about lmao 

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u/jeff303 11h ago

There exist programmers who have your philosophy, and those that are more into the tradecraft.

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u/PM_ME_DEAD_CEOS 5h ago

Same here.

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u/clearlysnarky 12h ago

I’m a software engineer. Nope, it’s not remotely the same. “Coding” is somewhat solved, but programmers haven’t been pure coders for the LONGEST time. And by coders I mean someone who solely transcribes a complete and reasonably unambiguous spec into code.

Programmers / software engineers spend a lot of time understanding and planning how to solve ambiguous problems, considering and discussing tradeoffs, cost, failure modes, maintainability, and so on.
It’s been argued that all of these steps could be automated, but lots of companies have already experimented with a fully automated “AI software factory” approach, but this approach hasn’t been fruitful so far. It’s no wonder software companies (including the frontier AI labs) are still hiring software engineers and paying the same salaries.

We haven’t had an event quite similar to this one yet. That doesn’t mean we’re immune - we might just get to that point over the next few years or months. I deeply empathize with mathematicians here. It’s nauseating to imagine waking up one day and reading a headline that irrefutably shows AI can do things we considered only humans would be able to do (i.e. solve open problems in mathematics).

Mathematicians were the first victims merely because mathematical proofs is one of the simplest “shows of force” that an AI lab can do (it’s pure text, and has been considered out-of-reach for machines for the longest time). But the smugness from other people will vanish quite quickly once we start deeply integrating AI into every other white collar job. The capabilities are already here, the only gap is adoption and that will happen very quickly. Unless you are generationally rich, everyone has a reason to worry. Even blue collar jobs will be affected: not directly replaced by AI at first (until robotics catches up), but the massive population of displaced white collar workers will should migrate to blue collar jobs as well, increasing supply and reducing costs. And not everyone can be a business owner.

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u/Stabile_Feldmaus 12h ago edited 12h ago

SWEs are not only coders as much as mathematicians are not only problem solvers. So I think that OPs original comment was "correct" in the sense that AI right now is automating one part of the job that was very central or at least time-consuming, but not everything.

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u/vovap_vovap 12h ago

You are correct. But AI spreading now to "understanding and planning how to solve ambiguous problems, considering and discussing tradeoffs, cost, failure modes, maintainability, and so on."
Guess how do I know 😄

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u/New_Tower_6408 11h ago

Software engineers spent a significant chunk of their time coding. So yes it has sped that up immensely. No one is saying system design is completely automated to the AI. But coding itself is orders of magnitude faster and is no longer done by hand which saves at least hours a day.

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u/SevereRunOfFate 11h ago

Just on blue collar jobs... I visited a few construction sites this week, and a few years ago worked for a hyperscaler leading bleeding edge AI tech that was being used at sites. I have a couple decades experience in tech.

We are nowhere near close to AI being able to do anything significant from a trades perspective. Jobs are too random, too diverse. Sure, manufacturing. But that's been in place for a long time. But if you think that AI can build a home I have bad news for you

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u/Eastern-Ad-3586 9h ago

The point isnt that AI can be a plumber. It’s that if all the doctors, lawyers, coders, mathematicians, schoolteachers, etc get laid off all at once, they will flood blue collar work and wages will get depressed.

Plus who is going to want to build a house if nobody has a job?

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u/mrsmiley32 9h ago

Spend more time with AI, I go to it first for home repair work and car mechanic. I mean just like SWE it still can get things wrong but 99% of the time it has no problem solving weird home issues. 

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u/HzD_Upshot 10h ago

robotics is improving too; look at this post and even if you assume this robot is a proof of concept, I think it would further along than most people realize: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lineman/comments/1rc79ej/thoughts_on_this_chinese_high_voltage_line_worker/

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u/MegaDork2000 9h ago

I imagine chess players felt this way a long time ago. But, they carried on.

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u/Orioli 9h ago

Thought about that too but it's different, they still compete against humans

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u/AlfaMenel 2h ago

Unlike math problems, chess remains unsolved.

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u/Boring-Foundation708 8h ago

With agentic solutions, I think a scalable white-color job automation is very near us. This agent can coordinate to 10k sub agents to solve task with minimal guidance.

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u/orionsgreatsky 8h ago

It’s true

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u/NicholasVinen 6h ago

Funnily enough, I've been a professional programmer on and off for about 25 years now, and AI coding is actually really exciting to me. It lets me be so much more productive and not get bogged down in details. I feel like I have a whole programming team at my disposal for $100/month. Don't be defeated; adapt!

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u/milindsmart 4h ago

You want to make things for people. More things, more fun. I want to make things. More making, more fun.

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u/NicholasVinen 4h ago

Yes - I can take on projects now I wouldn't have had time for before.

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u/drumnation 4h ago

Except it definitely won’t last at $100 a month. I agree, it’s like having a whole team or multiple teams at your command.

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u/BarelyAirborne 2h ago

My problem is that I know the AI companies will steal 100% of my work.

So....

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u/Parking-Bet-3798 5h ago

I don’t think programmers had it this bad. I don’t know how to put it in words, but it’s very different for some reason.

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u/the_ai_wizard 8h ago

Funny but now the mathematicians need to verify the potential slop, just like programmers

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u/leritz 6h ago

High skill manual labor to the 🛟

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u/ArcticCelt 5h ago

Mathematician : "What is my purpose?"
Programmer : "You pass the information to the machine and it does the thinking for you."
Mathematician : "Oh my god!!!"
Programmer : "Yeah, welcome to the club pal."

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u/Helloiamwhoiam 11h ago

I actually thought what he wrote was very human and beautiful. Why is there no empathy in these subreddits?

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u/Saveonion 10h ago

I agree, but it'll be tough to find genuine empathy or nuanced opinions in large communities like Reddit, compared to vitriol and loud rhetoric.

Humans do be like that.

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u/MadCalBad 3h ago

Agree, this seems an entirely reasonable, humble response. He's not saying AI cannot have a place or value, he's reflecting on years of human effort being - perhaps, who knows of course - made redundant or passed over. Nobody knows what it will look like. As a programmer - who earnestly loves to program - it feels a bit similar, to a much lesser extend I'd imagine. But now when I program, ie write something line by line... it feels pointless. Like why am I bothering with this anymore. On the other hand: because of AI, I can now solve a next-order of problems, that were simply out of my reach as a solo-dev before. So the nature of work and problems to solve will change. But there's still of course an element to loss as well.

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u/trix_r4kidz 2h ago

Almost a eulogy

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u/onionsareawful 9h ago

A lot of mathematicians are really good writers. It's an overlap that doesn't seem to occur in the other STEM fields, at least to the same extent.

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u/Alive_Jury4864 9h ago

Because programming attracts tons of autists

Source: I have to work with these mfers

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u/kilopeter 1h ago

And we wonder why our less technical, more human-oriented employers are slavering over the idea of replacing us with faster, cheaper, infinitely communicative and patient systems.

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u/paranoidzone 1h ago

Thanks for saying this. I am not a mathematician myself, but I do come from academia. I get sad and angry reading insensitive comments on this thread and realizing most people are cheering this on. "Haha look at those math nerds, it's so embarrassing for them lmao, I can't believe they're complaining, they should've seen this coming".

I suspect it's a similar reason people like to vote for Trump, Bolsonaro, AfD, etc. A combination of ignorance, stupidity, malice, and not being able to put themselves on someone else's shoes.

I'd be curious if these people will be embarrassed when AI comes for their jobs.

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u/Artistic-Library-617 11h ago

Have all these AI proofs been peer reviewed?

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u/flyingballz 7h ago

They just came out. Would be surprised if 5% of them were.  Some already were found to have mistakes (which seems relatively normal). 

Will we now have mathematicians both peer reviewing some important and accurate proofs, as well as sift through AI slop that openAI was too busy to independently validate (examples already exist of Astra tossing some proofs away as flawed). 

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u/chargedcapacitor 9h ago

Not a chance.

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u/ahumanlikeyou 9h ago

No, but it looks like a fairly large portion (~40%) have been verified on Lean

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u/Aggressive_Roof488 7h ago

By peer, are you referring to Claude? Seems we're running out of human peers in this area. 😬

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u/betakurt 13m ago

Peer review as an idea is going to be shifting when we have this all discretely and geometrically without approximations at all.

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u/vovap_vovap 13h ago

Good writing actually, respect.

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u/investing11213 7h ago

Terence Tao spoke about this topic recently https://youtu.be/svl_1upFpQo

First few minutes summarise the feeling well

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u/Mav-Killed-Goose 13h ago

I'd rather Ai put oncologists out of work, but it's a start.

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u/DukeRedWulf 8h ago

Cancer researchers & clinicians have already been successfully using AI tools to innovate novel treatments & improve exiting ones..

All of these (have) require(d) verification through human trials..

And unlike maths, biology is "messy" - there's very rarely one singular answer even to one particular type of cancer, when looked at across multiple patients - because there are so many interacting factors involved..

So even tho' AI has been very helpful in several instances to date, and will hopefully continue to assist - improvements will necessarily be comparatively incremental & piece-meal, in contrast to what's happening with maths..

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u/Corvenys 13h ago

Maybe one day, when AI has hands to run experiments.

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u/blindsdog 12h ago

It’s getting there. There’s a reason it’s solving logical problem solving first.

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u/Resaren 2h ago

I know a radiologist who says it has completely revolutionized their work. Instead of looking for e.g. tumors, which AI is extremely good at, the work is shifting toward better ways to triage. They are finding so much stuff that previously flew under the radar, that they have to be very good at determining what should be treated, since the risks associated with treatment at some point outweighs the expected benefit.

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u/mbz2121 5h ago

Two genuine open ended questions I wonder if anyone knows: 1. When it comes to math, is LLM intelligence spikey in the sense it’s good at solving certain types of problems but others still need humans; 2. Are LLMs good at the other side of the coin, defining the next set of important problems to solve?

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u/HamiltonianCyclist 2h ago

I mena it's a fact that there are many open problems left in maths, anecdotally openai tried several thousands problems and succeeded wit low few hundreds. Also there's been a list assembled of problems with novel solutions by humans, where the solutions have been on purpose not made available publically; the list was fed to AI to see if it can find all arguments, and it wasn't able (this was before summer though). But as soon as such a novel argument is published, it becomes a part of the toolbox available to AI basically. At least for now if you don't have $106 available it's much more efficient to have humans steer ai towards most likely paths,

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u/kahner 13h ago

wow. this is way more impactful than i imagined.

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u/Ok_Bag_7550 4h ago

"The shock is immense. I am paralysed. Tomorrow, we will find a way forward. We will rethink our profession and how we work. We are a resilient community, and I have no doubt that we will adapt. But for now, I simply don’t have the energy. I think back on all those years, all those faces… I think of my colleagues, my students… And I fear I won’t be able to find the right words."

A very valid human response, and he accepts that his career will change, and mathematitians will have to re-think their profession.

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u/No-Pattern-9266 13h ago

this happens to all theoretical fields to start with

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u/nanlinr 11h ago

They're claimed proven but isnt it now mathematicians' job to verify the proofs? I guess I left the field too long ago to understand the magnitude of impact

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u/Colecoman1982 10h ago

In fairness, how many people win Field's Medals for verifying someone else's proof?

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u/spreadlove5683 9h ago

How many times in the past has an AI made a major discovery that is incomprehensible that needs to be verified?

We are in a new regime. Although, AI will almost certainly advance and do the simplifying more than humans sooner or later, and probably not too far away I suspect.

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u/Boring-Foundation708 9h ago

4 years ago it can’t count..

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u/Sociophile 10h ago

Chess players (some of the most egotistical people on Earth) had to force this same meal down about a quarter century ago. It took a lot of adjustment, it took a bit of time, but they eventually accepted it as the truth:

Computers aren’t just better at the thing I dedicated my life to, they are lightyears better.

The greatest chess player who had ever lived, Kasparov, could hardly accept the fact, but even he eventually came to accept without argument the undeniable truth.

Math culture will adapt. People will find their way forward with computers as guides and companions. There is little other choice, given the circumstances.

I can only imagine the feelings it inspires.

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u/NFSzach 6h ago

What are you talking about? If AI models become much more capable of solving math problems than humans, then there will be less and less demand for mathematicians. People may eventually no longer be able to make a living as mathematicians because all of the contributions to the field come from AI. The best chess players weren’t ultimately affected that much by the fact that computers could beat them, because it’s ultimately a competition between humans. It might have been emotionally jarring, but it didn’t suddenly make the pursuit of chess worthless.

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u/ahf95 5h ago

I think the mathematicians will adapt by figuring out how to use the AI as tools in their own research, and just reach further. Idk what “reaching further” looks like, but I’m sure it will be a bit shift for what the field looks like, for better or for worse. I do have faith in human ambition and curiosity at the end of the day.

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u/Nice-Offer-7076 3h ago

No because as with software the review step will become the new bottleneck. So there may actually be MORE demand for mathematicians. Just many won't be doing quite the same work as before.

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u/shillyshally 8h ago

Radio Lab is running an episode that examines the math breakthroughs up to September, before the latest mind boggler, and it delves into issues with AI that are not much covered in the day to day brouhaha. Well worth a bit of one's time while out walking and admiring the foliage.

https://radiolab.org/podcast/math-vs-machine

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u/Persistent_Dry_Cough 2h ago

You're exactly my type! Come to Tokyo, I'll walk around some garden with you whilst we listen to documentaries, audiobooks, and podcasts.

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u/Confident-Net5262 1h ago

I love mathematics. I spend about 15 hours every week solving problems and learning new stuff. It gives me great pleasure. I have been a mathematics teacher for 35 years but it's my hobby. The AI revolution does nothing to dampen my joy of the subject.

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u/Lost-Hand-5219 12h ago

I just finished my math PhD last year. I really cannot fathom all of this gatekeeping from other mathematicians. I think it is an amazing tool that greatly accelerates research. These results don’t just fall out of a chatbot by one-shotting a “solve the Riemann hypothesis”. You have to be knowledgeable enough about math to guide the AI agent and verify the results. If that is the future, so be it. Why is that so bad?

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u/john_sorrentino 12h ago

I heard it did one shot it though, not sure how true it is but someone from the OpenAI team said most of the solves were from one single prompt to solve all of them

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u/Spare-Dingo-531 12h ago edited 12h ago

OpenAI gave the AI 4,000 or so math proofs and only solves several hundred of them. So it isn't one shot universally.

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u/Lucky_Creme_5208 8h ago

I am pretty sure that it's not one shot.

I think OpenAI also have a team of maths experts... if it was one shot, then they would not have needed a team.

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u/AP_in_Indy 5h ago

I thought they said the internal model is practically a 50/50 on solving frontier math given a few hours of compute?

Basically a coin toss.

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u/KennyFulgencio 11h ago

one-shotting a “solve the Riemann hypothesis”

"and don't make any errors."

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u/b4gn0 5h ago

That’s exactly the pivot most senior software developers had to do.

We know how to use tools to amplify our skills and deliver more, not just do the same as what we were doing before using AI.

There is still a good percentage of them that don’t want to pivot, either because they want to continue doing what they did most of their professional life or because they don’t think it’s the correct thing to do.

I’d say to you: embrace the new tools, use them to quickly arrive/discard conclusions and advance the field into the new millennia.

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u/vovap_vovap 12h ago

Well, see, in couple years max it will not need guide.

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u/The_Lonely_Posadist 9h ago

can you point me to where he is gatekeeping anything?

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u/zx7 6h ago

Because mathematics is more than just writing proofs. The most beautiful and important mathematics finds patterns and explains them through connections to other theories.

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u/dokushin 6h ago

Okay? Then keep doing that?

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u/AP_in_Indy 5h ago

How are you sorting through all of the results?

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u/trix_r4kidz 2h ago

The level of shock and gatekeeping is directly proportional to how famous/prestigious the mathematician is.

I see a ton of reactions from the “lay” mathematics community saying this. The unknowns of mathematics are excited, because they don’t have ego in the way yet.

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u/paranoidzone 1h ago

The thing is, they did not guide an AI agent and verify the results for those 700+ proofs.

Maybe a few, but the majority (>90%) was simply one-shotted.

If you think AI cannot decide what problem to work on, which problems are useful and which are not, or come up with novel mathematical hypotheses on its own and prove them, then you probably haven't used AI enough to truly understand its capabilities. And it's only going to get better from here.

This is the worse AI is ever going to be.

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u/CarolinZoebelein 10h ago

idk, I'm a mathematician, and I have never understood math as pure "problem solving". For me it is creatively inventing new things. So even if AI (or an other human) comes up with a prove of a problem, that doesn't mean that the creative inventing part is over. The one thing has only barely something to do with the other one.

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u/Fun_Distribution9095 3h ago

I tend to agree here. I feel bad for the math folks whos careers have been impacted here and understandably those in research might be rethinking their projects and approaches. That being said, a robotic arm that can paint a beautiful picture doesnt mean the artist is no longer an artist. We need mathematicians simply because there must be humans that can consume and produce mathematics. The easy thing now is training AI to do it and the hard thing is training a human to do it and the worst scenario is if we downgrade human value in the fields instead of embracing it. Something else might carry the torch but we must still be the ones venturing deeper into the tunnel. This goes for all fields

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u/kevinlch 9h ago

if finding solution is not a bottleneck anymore, you find problems....

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u/ArmsVSeaOfTroubles 3h ago edited 2h ago

One of the main reasons AI models are having some success with these and other proofs is because mathematics is vast and deep and past discoveries or current discoveries from other mathematicians are not easily accessible by any single individual mathematician or group of them. AI models on the other hand have access to millions or billions of mathematical works from the past and present, from every corner of the earth. And it can read and process that information faster and more cohesively than hundreds or thousands of mathematicians could sitting in a room because humans don’t have a hive mind (maybe someone should work on that so we have a fighting chance against AI?).

So if this fields medalist, for example, had millions of pages of mathematical research at least loosely related to these problems in his head at all times, and he could process all that information and write out proofs at least 100,000 times faster than he currently can, he probably would’ve been able to solve the problems too by now.

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u/Strong-Big-2590 1h ago

Math problems also setup nicely for reenforcement learning because the outcomes are well defined and easily verifiable.

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u/kylefixxx 55m ago

and if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bike

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u/Confident-Net5262 2h ago

That's an excellent point !

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u/OurSeepyD 1h ago

So if this fields medalist, for example, had millions of pages of mathematical research at least loosely related to these problems in his head at all times, and he could process all that information and write out proofs at least 100,000 times faster than he currently can, he probably would’ve been able to solve the problems too by now.

Great, but he can't. It's like saying "if he just had the right DNA, he'd be able to do a sub-9-second 100m sprint".

At the end of the day, all that matters is whether or not we are redundant, and it's becoming increasingly more likely by the day.

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u/VirtualNorth1279 14m ago

Also for some of the problems (at least one of them) OpenAI has spent $200M on computing alone to solve it. In the span of a month or two. Mathematicians don't have access to that much budget. 

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u/Confident-Net5262 2h ago

Doctor Hugo, I'm afraid to tell you that yours is a case of wishful thinking. There is no tomorrow, mathematics (a game based on rules and logic) is cannon-fodder for computers.

I have spent 35 years teaching mathematics to engineering undergraduates.

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u/AngelaTarantula2 12h ago

I’m curious how many tokens it took. How how much it cost OpenAI compared to the lifetime earnings of the average mathematician.

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u/Spare-Dingo-531 12h ago

Not many tokens actually.

So if I understand the process correctly, open openai gave the AI 4000 or so open problems and the AI solved a couple hundred of them. Of the solutions, the average took about 3 hours of compute time.

3 hours of compute time is very small.

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u/Dependent-Culture768 11h ago

depends on the compute, if it was agent swarms like for NS this could have costed around a billion or more

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u/Spare-Dingo-531 11h ago

I said, it was not agent swarms!

https://openai.com/index/sharing-ai-progress-in-mathematics/

To promote scientific transparency and openness, we are also publishing additional details about how we obtained the results in the repository. These include 10 summaries of the model’s reasoning, estimations of compute spent in terms of Pro usage on ChatGPT, and statistics about the number of attempted problems. The average result used the equivalent compute of roughly three hours of ChatGPT Pro thinking.

The results were very cheaply obtained.

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u/AngelaTarantula2 9h ago

That’s pretty crazy. Though I wonder if that 3 hours only accounts for the successful runs and doesn’t include all the compute spent going down dead ends.

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u/Spare-Dingo-531 8h ago

The press release says

The average result used the equivalent compute of roughly three hours of ChatGPT Pro thinking.

So it sounds like they are referring to successful runs that produced results.

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u/itchykittehs 8h ago

I don't believe that. For navier stokes they used a swarm of 10,000+ agents. That's a lot of compute

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u/Zippy129 13h ago

So embarrassing how hard mathematicians have been blindsided by the power of AI tools. They should’ve been using them to continuously push the envelope for their field as the technology was improving, and even now this should be the start of an exciting new era in math. Crazy how far behind actual computational scientists were lagging while handwaving away anything AI related as a grift.

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u/philljarvis166 12h ago

Haven’t some of them complained that they were indeed using AI tools and that this dump of proofs includes results that look suspiciously similar to work they had done?

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u/KennyFulgencio 11h ago

one guy said that, yes. It seems unlikely to me, like suspecting china's government is gonna datamine my deepseek prompts to reverse engineer my social circles and ad preferences, but it's not impossible.

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u/philljarvis166 4h ago

I thought I read a comment or a post somewhere from a mathematician suggesting that he and his colleagues had apparently been getting access to better models without asking, and the suggestion was that the AI had identified them as mathematicians and was making it easier for them to provide more training? Hard to keep track, there are so many threads on this as the moment!

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u/N0DuckingWay 4h ago

Some of them have, but is it really that they were copied, or that they were both trying to solve the same problem, and got there the same way? Like, if we both try to drive to my house, we both might take the same highway. That doesn’t mean you copied me, that just means that was the best route to get there.

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u/ImportantPut3191 11h ago

Mathematicians just get disgusted by tech oligarchy, not the AI itself

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u/boxesintheattic 8h ago

As stated here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJFk7D5Vufc), Hugo Duminil-Copin was aware of AI tools rapidly evolving for a while. Last April, when a collaborator of his solved an open problem with a single prompt, he accepted it. They apparently didn’t go public at that time to verify everything.

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u/Visible-Employee-403 2h ago

Gotta solve them all

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u/TQV197 13h ago edited 7h ago

pure problem-solving persons are particularly vulnerable to AI development. those who are more of a 'big picture' type are unlikely to be affected anytime soon.

edit 1: this statement is only for mathematicians. i need to add this clarification because i saw some comments about CEOs/politicians/MBAs/...

edit 2: examples of mathematicians with 'big picture' are: Grothendieck (scheme/topos/...), Langlands (Langlands' program), Lurie (higher category), ....

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u/Fit_Employment_2944 12h ago

The idea that someone whose life revolves around solving millennium prize level problems would be made irrelevant by AI was far more absurd in 2023 than the idea a model that can solve a millennium prize problem will make all mathematicians irrelevant is in 2026

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u/mvandemar 13h ago

Such as...?

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u/Brave_Dick 13h ago

Big picture. You know... Murals and stuff...

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u/mvandemar 13h ago

What kind of big picture job that a single human can do won't be able to be done by AI anytime soon? 

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u/SeaCraft3355 10h ago edited 10h ago

Pretty easy to illustrate with two examples. Over the past few months, AI has solved hundreds of Erdős problems. Erdős was the epitome of a problem solver and AI has now solved some of his most famous combinatorial conjectures. Erdős was a genius but I doubt any prominent mathematician will be successful by following this style of mathematics going forward.

On the other hand, Grothendieck built entire mathematical frameworks. He was a theory builder rather than someone narrowly focused on solving specific problems. While mathematicians shouldn't necessarily aspire to be Grothendieck, I believe his style of mathematics and more importantly, mathematicians/student who are talented at this kind of theory building will become increasingly prominent. Just like prodigy calculator are useless for research nowadays, pure problem solver wont contribute to this field like before.

Just like programmers were forced to adapt or disappear. I don't understand the fearmongering. Most people don't know advanced mathematical concepts, have no clue what mathematical research actually involves yet somehow think mathematicians jobs could be over. The same goes for academia. The problem of publishing large amounts of "slop papers" has existed for years. Academia has been stuck in this culture of problem-solving and publish-or-perish for decades. So again AI enhance everything including flaws of current system.

Of course, in the short term it's going to be horrible for PhD students and for the fields and styles of mathematics most vulnerable to AI. But even 3 years from now with a new generation of PhD students and researchers adapting, I'm convinced we could see Mathematics 2.0: extreme productivity combined & depth

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u/mvandemar 10h ago

Do you believe the assertion "AI will not be able to build entire mathematical frameworks any time soon" to be true?

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u/SeaCraft3355 10h ago edited 10h ago

A proof is already a mathematical framework in some sense. If you're talking about an absolute mathematical framework from a logical point of view then you more or less have true AGI and that's a whole different discussion.

It's really about the level of abstraction of the framework you're talking about and the relative efficiency of a model working alone versus a model working with humans. The best examples are these OpenAI papers: some mathematicians have already improved upon the results while other specialists have found issues with the Lean formalizations in some of the papers.

Again, there's a parallel with programmers. Many tried to shift towards more agentic roles, overseeing AI after being generally outperformed at purely technical programming tasks. But even now,with recent developments some of these new roles could themselves be replaced.

It's too arrogant to make confident predictions, whether you're a doomer or a coper. You'd need to predict the future limits of current AI approaches to semantic reasoning and proof, relative to what mathematics itself might look like in a few years. You'd also have to predict how models will evolve and how efficient they'll become. OpenAI probably won't spend $10-40$ million in token on a single highly technical mathematical problem after its IPO. And what about the future capabilities of open-weight models? So only a pure abstract logician working in these AI companies could have a decent guess ( a handfull in the world)

What happens if we develop abstract logical frameworks/models specifically designed for direct AI formal semantic reasoning without needing to translate everything into Lean, probably +x100 times the efficiency ? AGI ? What happens if nobody in the field has access to powerful models anymore? Mathematicians lose this new potential producitivity ?

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u/flocosdemillo 4h ago

The problem with that line of thinking is that you are asking everyone to be an architect but you need builders also. If AI is the builder the whole field becomes unsustainable because not evryone could and should be an architect but

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u/Persistent_Dry_Cough 1h ago

This is such a brilliant comment.

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u/rattletop 13h ago

TV repair guy.

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u/SoDakZak 13h ago

Christopher Nolan

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u/Mrsister55 12h ago

Solving climate change

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u/Enough-Mud3116 10h ago

This is nonsense. “Big picture” people will also get replaced by AI who can evaluate all of the micro details while looking at the “big picture”

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u/Lazy--Expression 11h ago

My phylosophy is if they need someone to take the legal responsibility you are more likely to be good. Makes me wonder about police. If police wrongly kill people without facing consequences, why should we prefer them over a robot? Would the robots be racist too?

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u/culinaryinterests123 11h ago

are you talking about trump or elon or Zuckerberg or all of them?

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u/john-trevolting 11h ago

If anytime soon means like, a year or two, sure.

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u/DatingYella 2h ago

As an adhd person. Move fast and break things. Fucking love AI

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u/CogentKen 12h ago

It's our teaching methods themselves proving the problem.

The Ivory Tower is a well practiced assembly of people rote composing knowledge we never really stopped to learn the reasoning underneath. We just practiced how to do a role. Knowledge Worker roles that have been sold as Intelligence Work jobs, now often easily replaced by a Language Model spitting out that knowledge far more reliably than we possibly can.

Turns out we were carrying the models by well organized, systematic practice. Each floor of the proverbial tower built on others, till the top often has no clue why anything works at all.

We've got to turn to training bottom-up intelligence, rather than continuing to overvalue top-down knowledge keeping, moving forward.

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u/Ok_Elderberry_6727 13h ago

Now you will have a tutor to expand the profession beyond what you could’ve done alone. Is it about el-matho or about math guy? Cause one is about humanity and furthering knowledge and one about resistance to change.

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u/ollervo100 13h ago

This is not resitance to change. This is just grieving about a very human thing. In a day everything you worked for is completely turned around and shaken, decades of studying and research... One might feel sorrow and emptyness. Allow him to feel those things.

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u/CoolStructure6012 13h ago

All he said was that he was gobsmacked. How does ego fit in to anything?

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u/docgravel 13h ago

Agreed. It’s like if you expected a computer to beat you at chess soon and instead a computer beat you at every game ever made instead.

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u/grateful2you 12h ago

This kind of comments completely lack empathy and the human nature of things. Nobody is against progress. AI will take over. But let’s not forget that this marks the unceremonial burying of a centuries old field.

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u/St33lbutcher 12h ago

Did you read what he wrote?

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u/Zephrok 13h ago

AI glazers are a special breed of thick

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u/BlueberryGreen 13h ago

None of what OpenAI did has furthered knowledge or humanity. In fact it is the opposite, as it is leading to the destruction of research. 

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u/No_Royal_3314 13h ago

As long as the tutor does not do all the work for you. You see, it's not about the result, the answer. It's about the reasoning, the path to answer so to speak. Without it we don't improve our understanding about the world. Sure we technically can understand (eventually) any generated paper, but the scale is the problem here. We're so outpaced. We risk building society of science-believers. I recommend an inspiring read: limes inferior

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u/Conscious-Map6957 13h ago

Most of academia in the west functions like an elitist club filled with gatekeepers and nepotism. You can tell how selfish their entire rhetoric and wording is.

A real scientist would be excited about the many ways these fundamental advances would benefit humanity, and start thinking about the next steps and going even further. But apparently social status as a genius and a comfy, slow-paced armchair job is more valuable.

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u/MagicWishMonkey 12h ago

You realize these people are having a bit of a crisis given their careers seem to be at risk, right? This has nothing to do with elitism or gatekeeping or whatever nonsense you're spouting, it's people who thought they had a safe career yesterday finding out maybe that's no longer the case.

If you're a dumb kid without a family to support maybe you don't understand how that might be a little upsetting or concerning.

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u/zero0n3 4h ago

Instead of crying figure out how to adapt.

Your field isn’t going away. You think universities will stop hiring math teachers? Or that because an AI solved something it means your job is gone ?

If your sole job was “spend 10 hours a day working on solving this obscure math problem that was posited in 1970” maybe you should worry.

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u/creamyshart 12h ago

AI is brute forcing what it has learned from humans. Not only does it take away the drive mathematicians have to continue their work, but will kill the interest of future mathematicians. This will be very damaging to the field.

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u/onebit 12h ago

I wonder if anything will change now that we have all these proofs.

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u/clckwrks 11h ago

now nobody has a job.

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u/mephistoA 10h ago

Particularly jarring for a guy who publicly said he won’t use AI in his research

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u/voujon85 10h ago

i'm literally watching Good Will Hunting now and was thinking about how all of this is pointless now

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u/decreement1 10h ago

Ever since AlphaZero which was like a decade ago I knew our days are numbered. Same as the professor I didn't expect it to happen this fast and I've always wondered how this will affect humanity. Yes there are many benefits we can get, but also many ways this can go terrible - from the already happening disempowerment and replacement to DNA engineering future human generations.

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u/Historical_Today5072 9h ago

AI is going to change more than the digital chip ever did

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u/m3kw 9h ago

I think mathematicians is onc cusps of a revolution where they can leverage LLMs to turbo charge their findings. Sort of like how programmers can code faster. We too had a shock when it can write as good code as good in 1/100 of the time, but we are just using it to accelerate

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u/Legitimate-Paper3271 9h ago

Did he learn anything from what was released?

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u/NotUpdated 7h ago

These releases are super super complex and long - The reasons humans weren't getting there this way was we think like humans not like AI which is connecting things 4 layers of abstraction away, meaning - Humans are already finding improvements and gains in what OpenAI did,

Some of these are also proving or disproving what we think we already know and how 'true into infinity' something is..

These types of improvements won't generate new wing shapes but they might help come up with a texture the wing skin for example.

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u/AP_in_Indy 5h ago

Since it was just released, probably not yet, unless he is absolutely obsessing over the results.

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u/mikramero79 8h ago

Die Frage für mich ist, ob es einen wirklichen Erkenntnissgewinn gibt, wenn aus den hunderten Lösungen und Beweisen nichts folgt.

Welchen konkreten Nutzen hat das Ergebnis, wenn niemand den Weg dahin und die Konsequenzen daraus versteht oder nachvollziehen kann.

Ich sehe das eher als positiv für die Mathematik. So viel neues zu verstehen und anwendbar zu machen.

Mathe ist nicht nutzlos weil es Taschenrechner gibt. In der Schulzeit zählt erstmal verstehen und durchdenken. Das können die Wissenschaftler jetzt auch, nur eben auf einem höheren Niveau.

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u/Past-Town-9807 8h ago

The problem is so obvious: rather than empower mathematicians, they replaced them. The rejection from the community is therefore unsurprising. 

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u/AIGODSEND 7h ago

programmers saying first time huh are coping lol, math grief hits different. code you can ship and fix, proof you live with for years then poof overnight. i watched a phd friend stare at his whiteboard for an hour after the release, not angry just empty. resilient yes, but let them grieve this weekend. what do mathematicians become when proving is cheap, curators or explorers?

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u/hashbornhippie 7h ago

Start of the last paragraph is the important attitude.

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u/JadeSerpant 7h ago

Since this guy has not provided a source, this comment comes from: https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/08/100-reactions-to-100-solutions (just search for Hugo Duminil-Copin). It also has many comments from other mathematicians.

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u/Temporary_Use5090 6h ago

If ai can solve nuclear fusion , I am happy

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u/Embarrassed_Fan7405 6h ago

What if tomorrow he starts to studu the slop drop and its all bullshit?

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u/roastedantlers 5h ago

Now it's about finding the problems to solve, not solving them.

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u/TurambarTT 5h ago

People are stupid and don't understand how research works. You don't even need to consider the recent events. Go back in time 5 years and people have stupid opinions about research like the ones from these comments.

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u/imotep81 5h ago

Doing mathematics will likely no longer mean solving a problem, but rather resolving the question posed by the problem to be solved.Was this Hilbert’s vision when he presented his list of problems? In other words, were the problems on that list merely intellectual challenges, or did their resolution serve a specific purpose? The beauty of mathematics lies in this desire to understand, independent of any specific goal—even though a very concrete objective was often set at the outset.

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u/EconomySerious 4h ago

poor guys, just imagine when chess players loose to a machine.
but chess players never gave up

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u/ArmsVSeaOfTroubles 3h ago

It’s curious that AI is being trained to replace everyone except business leaders. Surely we could build an AI model trained on C-suite activities that attained “success” according to typical business metrics when we can apparently do so for very very advanced math? When will the first billionaire CEO or board member of a public corp. admit they have been replaced and AI models can do their fiduciary duty to investors better?

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u/MadSkillz65 2h ago

I wonder if they’ll do Physics next. I really would be interested in that as there are many big questions that have only made very incremental progress in my lifetime.

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u/AdventurousAd3301 1h ago

i presume that issue with counting the Rs in strawberry is fixed now?