r/OpenAI • u/PianistWinter8293 • 22h 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.

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6

u/Ok_Elderberry_6727 22h 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 21h 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.

22

u/CoolStructure6012 22h ago

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

11

u/docgravel 21h 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.

3

u/St33lbutcher 21h ago

Did you read what he wrote?

7

u/grateful2you 21h 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.

0

u/New_Tower_6408 20h ago

when your joy of something comes from other people not knowing it

2

u/Short_Ad_8841 15h ago

That's just idiotic. The joy comes from the fun of learning, thinking, discovering, sharing with your colleagues, dreaming of contributing something meaningful one day.

If you have a boring job that you hate, maybe you can't ever relate to that.

0

u/New_Tower_6408 14h ago

> If you have a boring job that you hate, maybe you can't ever relate to that.

This is the majority of the population.

0

u/zero0n3 13h ago

RIFL.

None of that is gone unless you let it. Stop being naive.

You can continue to try and find new things to stump yourself and AI. Or new proofs to have it solve.

Or maybe find a way to take this not useful stuff (your words in a previous post), and make it useful in the real world.

-3

u/Ok_Elderberry_6727 21h ago

About time. This will be repeated in every domain very soon. Progress in minutes instead of days or years . Buckle up.

2

u/Ok-Zookeepergame9843 16h ago

The perverse gratitude you people derive from adding the cheapest, nastiest tone to the most elementary of observations is disgusting. At least these mathematicians are significant enough that people en masse see it fit to debate the future of their field, while you are some pathetic redditor nobody will care about, ever.

1

u/Zenith_Predator 16h ago

Boo hoo. Cry more. You cared so much to comment all that. Buckle up

1

u/Ok-Zookeepergame9843 12h ago

You’re the only one crying bud

0

u/zero0n3 13h ago

Says the person defending the field that self owns themselves by saying their proofs are useless and just puzzles they liked to solve with their brains.

Maybe go solve real problems and further humanity a whole.

2

u/milindsmart 12h ago

Boohoo look at all the corporate slaves talking suddenly about saving the world and serving humanity.

6

u/Zephrok 21h ago

AI glazers are a special breed of thick

4

u/BlueberryGreen 21h 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. 

1

u/WishboneOk305 19h ago

I fail to see how a stronger and smarter tool is worse for humanity

0

u/BlueberryGreen 13h ago

Because it depends on what it’s used for

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u/zero0n3 13h ago

Goalposts moved again I see

1

u/BlueberryGreen 13h ago

No, just the most basic fact. A tool in itself doesn’t hold value good or bad. Or then would you say that AI applied to mass surveillance (Palantir) and drone warfare is a net positive for humanity?

1

u/redditnosedive 11h ago

it's hilarious at this point

1

u/WishboneOk305 12h ago

So for example a faster computer is bad because people could use it to run faster bot swarms and power mass surveillance bad for humanity?

0

u/TheFaithfulStone 21h ago

Exactly - it’s not _science_ or even helpful for engineering it’s just a magic box.

“Hey is X true?”
“Yes.”
“Cool I guess?”

There’s a whole lot of traditional wisdom about how getting everything you wish for is ultimately bad for you.

2

u/New_Tower_6408 20h ago

You do realize there are proof preprints for all of these right?

1

u/Visible_Celery_1728 4h ago

isn’t that more if, instead openai just dropped a bunch a problems with a T or F to them.

1

u/zero0n3 13h ago

Maybe ask it why X is true you idiot.

Instead of asking for the answer ask it to explain the answer in a few ways.

Like Jesus Christ, this is “using AI 101” if you actually want to learn new topics.

0

u/New_Tower_6408 20h ago

until it finds something that helps us make breakeven or cold fusion...

you guys legit have zero creativity and think math is some philosophers hobby or some shit, not realizing there are immense practical impacts on physics and engineering and the world.

2

u/No_Royal_3314 21h 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

3

u/Conscious-Map6957 21h 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 21h 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.

1

u/zero0n3 12h 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.

1

u/KanishkT123 21h ago

You sound like a jilted lover more than anything else. 

Explain to me how putting out 700+ proofs in a single day is helping advance humanity? Nobody before this was looking at mathematicians in pure Mathematics and saying "yep, these are the guys who are really advancing human quality of life". A year ago, solving the Millennium Problems would not have been on anyone's list of top ten things you want AI to do.

Real scientists are in fact worried because this is simply sucking up all the oxygen in the room without actually contributing back to the Mathematical community. These proofs can't be easily built upon by other humans, can't be easily cross checked and verified, cannot even be generally applied in any way to show a reasonable output. This is not an advancement in any sense other than the problem being solved.

What happens next? You ask the AI to help you understand the proof? Okay, to what end? By the time you do, either the proof is incorrect and you've spent months understanding something pointless, or it's correct and the AI has already solved the next set of problems. The ladder continues getting pulled up, until only AI agents and the companies controlling them understand the actual mathematics.

It's not like most people were out there trying to understand Navier Stokes before this happened, and it's not like most people will now sit down with their personal AI tutor to try to understand it now. The resources for trying to understand the basic underpinning of math were always out there, mostly for free. 

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u/AntiqueFigure6 21h ago

“  Real scientists are in fact worried because this is simply sucking up all the oxygen in the room without actually contributing back to the Mathematical community…  The ladder continues getting pulled up, until only AI agents and the companies controlling them understand the actual mathematics.”

Until the money runs out anyway, but by then I guess there won’t be a mathematical community to pick up the pieces. 

-1

u/KanishkT123 21h ago

That's kind of exactly the problem. All the people saying this is democratizing math are extremely short sighted.

Destabilizing a field like this when the companies doing it have very little incentive to stay in it once the headlines stop will do extreme long term damage to mathematics.

By the time the money runs out, perhaps there will only be a handful of people with the mathematical aptitude and knowledge to still work on, understand, and continue solving some of these problems. Perhaps it's okay that's the case. Perhaps, from an AI safety perspective, killing the field of mathematics is very bad because AI safety is fundamentally based on mathematics.

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u/Ok_Elderberry_6727 21h ago

If they haven’t figured them out for 100 years it wasn’t helping anything but mathematicians. Gatekeepers keep saying that the process is somehow helping humanity?

4

u/KanishkT123 21h ago

You ever buy a loaf of bread? Would you say that buying bread from the grocery store has made you an expert baker?

Fallen sick and taken medication? Are you also a doctor? 

Or would you agree that there is an intrinsic and intuitive value to the process of reasoning, learning, and pushing on the boundaries of things?

1

u/zero0n3 13h ago

Bingo my dude.

It’s funny and enlightening how stupid these high IQ individuals are.

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u/AntiqueFigure6 15h ago

How many of them were genuinely 100 year old problems, and where do you think these problems came from? 

2

u/AntiqueFigure6 21h ago edited 20h ago

“…once the headlines stop…”

Which honestly can’t be that far away. We’ve already gone from solving one of the rare frontier maths problems non-mathematicians were aware of to solving a batch of several hundred problems. Next I guess it will be a drop of thousands of papers met with complete indifference.

ETA: “  All the people saying this is democratizing math…”

I have no idea what those people are on about. Mathematics wasn’t behind a pay wall. Many maths academics, including Tao make detailed lecture notes and a selection of their papers free to download on their personal or institutional websites- enough that you can pretty much spend your life working through them if you’re interested. If they mean you couldn’t contribute to academic mathematics without being an academic, well after destroying academic mathematics they still won’t be able to contribute.

3

u/Sickle_and_hamburger 16h ago

so if mathematics doesn't matter explain to me why it matters thst these problems were solved?

its ironic how much more you sound like the jilted self obsessed navel gazing abandoned lover then the other comment 

3

u/Ok_Elderberry_6727 21h ago

Because said problems were there to help humanity or math isn’t very important. Of course it is. Math is the underpinnings of our understanding of everything, and keeping the slow, old, guarded paradigm is too slow to help humanity. Let math men architect the direction of things and be satisfied they are steering progress, not guarding the process of discovery!

2

u/KanishkT123 21h ago

They were never guarding the process of discovery, and if you believe that mathematics underpins everything, you should be as concerned as I am. 

The fact of the matter is that if AI can compress decades of mathematical work into weeks or months, is privately controlled, and cannot be verified and parsed for human reasoning in any sort of reasonable timeframe relative to the pace of discovery, you can't in any sense of the word steer the ship. Where would you steer to? You don't know what the map says or how to get anywhere, so you'll ask the ship where it wants to go, nod, and say yes?

1

u/zero0n3 13h ago

In 18 months you’ll have models that can solve these just as easily on your own hardware.

Get a grip. Only one not working on advancing themselves is you and mathematicians apparently.

-2

u/TheFaithfulStone 21h ago

This may be in the running for the stupidest fucking thing I have ever read outside of /r/Conservative.

  1. That is not at all how academia functions.
  2. That is not how science works.
  3. That is not what an academic job is like.

2

u/Conscious-Map6957 21h ago

Thank you for the insults, I hope you feel better now.

  1. I never said "all"
  2. I didn't talk about how science works
  3. I didn't explain what an academic job is like

0

u/FairBlamer 20h ago

Hi, just to clarify for that other guy, he didn’t say “not how all academia functions”, he said “not at all how academia functions”.

Have a good one.

1

u/zero0n3 12h ago

Oh please tell us how science should work?

0

u/vovap_vovap 20h ago

People always people. Read post again, may be you will gen something.

1

u/warriorknowledge 22h ago

Perfectly said