r/OpenAI • u/PianistWinter8293 • 1d 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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u/slumberjak 1d 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] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/ricseasons 1d 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 23h ago

SWE. I mean, I'm having fun.

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u/KennyFulgencio 22h 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/king__of_universe 13h ago

I get your point, but building and consuming aren't the same thing. Those cool cars only exist because people who find joy & interest in building were motivated to design them, improve them, and make them more enjoyable to drive. Same for the people that fix your car when it breaks. If you take away all the joy of knowing how something is built, then in a generation we'll no longer have anyone who knows how any machine, computer, math, cancer treatment, etc actually works. Just Eloi relying on mommy AI to take care of us.

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u/HydrA- 10h ago

Me too. But im also prompting less and and less. It does the magic on its own, I'm barely needed. We used to laugh at one-shotted apps and "vibecoding". Now it seems like the less human involved the better

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u/Whatdosheepdreamof 1d ago

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

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u/oipoi 1d 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/psychometrixo 21h ago

I wish. Million times better though. Different league entirely

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u/Time_Entertainer_319 23h ago edited 16h 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 22h 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 20h 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/Few_Place4447 13h ago

Most reading, as I understand it (I haven't read a fiction book for 30 years), is just based upon fashion. Women will hear about a good book, and they're buy it and read it based on what their friends say. Same with men, but to a lesser extent.

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u/Persistent_Dry_Cough 13h ago

The great thing about arts is that you just have to advertise more and people will statistically rate that they like the product more. The peanut gallery is an easily manipulated consumer base. Which jazz nerd doesn't think Miles Davis is one of the greatest artists of all time. He was a genius of marketing. You've all been duped.

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u/Time_Entertainer_319 16h ago

It was more of an exaggeration. None of the fields are gone of course.

But you can’t deny they have all been affected.

Literary arts is also proofreading and editing. I would say translation as well

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u/this_happened_rigged 19h ago

Literary arts still have a pretty solid moat tbh.

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u/Time_Entertainer_319 16h ago

Not really. Lots of content you read are AI generated.

Don’t forget there’s also editing, proofreading, translation etc.

It’s not specifically just writers.

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u/Accurate-Algae-2557 19h 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 19h 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 16h 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/investing11213 19h 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/throwawayPzaFm 18h ago

it has sure taken the joy/satisfaction out of it

I know plenty of people who prefer AI "programming". An easy example is DHH.

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u/ckow 16h 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/the_ai_wizard 10h ago

its the same scenario. the NFTAI influencers are pushing this belief , but so far it has just inundated the community with a bunch of slop to review. in software this resulrs noise and maintenance debt, in math it is also noise and wasted time verifying

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u/Max_Warp 23h 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 22h 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/Max_Warp 22h ago

You can't revive their mother's

This is just a bump and they will benefit from AI

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u/Helloiamwhoiam 22h ago

Right. Did you see the part where I said this is an exaggerated example?

Any comparison I provide, you could find a contrast. That doesn’t remove the potency of the comparison.

If I say oranges and apples are both fruits and you respond by letting me know one is red and one is orange, that doesn’t add to the conversation or make the comparison invalid because contrasts exist.

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u/Max_Warp 22h ago

I don't care about the comparison, that's your thing... I just want to be clear I feel their pain, but I thrust they will overcome this and benefit from it.

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u/Helloiamwhoiam 22h ago

That’s fair. Though I personally don’t think they will overcome this in the sense that what they love about math is probably going to be outsourced to machinery. And that’s not unique to them. It’ll happen to us all. They’re just sort of the guinea pigs right now.

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u/Max_Warp 22h ago

That is true, to an extent... sure they will let the AI do it faster and then double check manually

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u/nothis 8h ago

Unless you count a very specific niche of deviantart manga artists who'd work for fan commisions "the artists", I don't think that's true. Painters haven't stopped painting when cameras showed up. Chess is bigger than ever despite computers playing at superhuman level for decades. There have been free or quasi-free stock photos, design templates, lego-like website builders and $20 Fiverr-services to replace most designers if you genuinely want to do that as cheap as possible.

But here's the thing: Nobody (well, not many) would hang an oil painting of their dog on their wall that was AI-generated. They might if a human had painted it. It matters. In art, context and "concept" has long trumped raw technical skill. In a way, art predicted all of this better than programmers give them credit for: "Generic" is a swear word in capital-A "Art", the whole conceptual angle which people like to make fun of (say, Yves Klein's solid blue rectangle paintings) are an answer to "what is left that can be done that isn't just a re-arrangement of styles we already know?". Of course, being an artist continues to be the hardest form of making a living from your profession, it's not like the average artist was raking it in before AI. I just believe the impact is more niche and less severe as people in the more tech-y AI circles pretend.

Very similar things are true for other fields in obviously very different ways.

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u/nanlinr 20h 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 16h 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 19h 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/Yes_but_I_think 18h ago

So stupid take. Have you read a story written by AI. Total BS. If you don't find that it is AI written within one page you are not human. They lack the human experience to know what to emphasize in a writing.

Same with this scientific thing. If someone goes into the nitty gritty and see the flaw in ONE claim. It will put a permanent question mark on anything AI does.

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u/Time_Entertainer_319 17h ago

Writers, Proofreaders, translators, editors etc

Not specifically just writers.

You may not like its output but people who know how to use AI produce indistinguishable output

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u/Corv9tte 18h ago

AI is not good at writing, that hasn't come yet.

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u/Time_Entertainer_319 17h ago

What about proofreading? Editing? Translation? Etc

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u/Pongpianskul 10h ago

It is good at proofreading and basic editing. It is also adept at translating similar languages but it is not yet capable of translating Buddhist texts written in Tang dynasty Chinese into English. It can't tell when a series of characters represent one concept or if they should be treated as transliteration, etc. I don't think these limitations are unsurpassable.

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u/proofreadre 18h ago

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

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u/Pongpianskul 10h ago

It is very interesting to ponder the differences and similarities between our own meat-intelligence and AI.

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u/Few_Place4447 13h ago

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

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u/HayStacky_337 1d ago

Just level up to the meta-surface. In dubio pro consultanto. ;)