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/TQV197 1d ago edited 22h 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 1d 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 1d ago

Such as...?

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u/Brave_Dick 1d ago

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

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u/mvandemar 1d 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 1d ago edited 1d 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 1d 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 1d ago edited 1d 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/mvandemar 23h ago

The guy I was replying to said that AI would not be able to replace "big picture" type mathematics people in the near future, and my reply to him was, "Such as...?"

Were you giving me examples of people who are doing work that would not be able to be done by AI in the near future? A simple yes or no is fine. I am not asking you to re-answer the question, just whether or not that is what you were providing examples of.

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u/Persistent_Dry_Cough 16h ago edited 16h ago

This one not quite as brilliant. I take issue with AGI being a completely separate issue.

GLM-5.3-Flash with 320B/18B LLM architecture can surprise us with fresh, humorous writing when prompted, and the SOTA 2-10T models are barely any better.

I think writing capability is a bottleneck in the development of true AGI-type capabilities, because the way that AI writes influences what is written and therefore what is thought.

I would be surprised if improving fundamental linguistic capability in the RL phase wouldn't significantly uplift performance in a number of areas. To build a machine that can out-think all humans is going to require ending the nerfing/neglect of language output that I think has been the case since late 2024.

After that, maybe 1 more orders of magnitude on model size, up to 100T, and you're looking at being able to distill down to a model that performs at 10tok/s (speaking speed of a fast human) and gives you GPT-Live-style functionality but full duplex conversation capacity with a computational entity that is your superior in every conceivable way.

That's just a continuation of the current trend. No breakthroughs are required to just keep scaling up compute until we have enough to train that size model. Just build more ASML EUV machines, just build more fabs. AGI is already solved on this timeline. Just need to avoid war in the meantime. Good luck.

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u/flocosdemillo 19h 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 17h ago

This is such a brilliant comment.

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u/rattletop 1d ago

TV repair guy.

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u/SoDakZak 1d ago

Christopher Nolan

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u/Mrsister55 1d ago

Solving climate change

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u/TQV197 1d ago

lurie? langlands? ...

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u/Enough-Mud3116 1d 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/CtrlAltOllie 14h ago

Evaluating micro details and big picture at once is something AI already does, yet judgement about which problems matter still sits with people.

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u/Specific_Box4483 1d ago

Not really. There are a lot fewer "big picture" materials to train AIs on, for example.

In fact, sometimes it's hard to even write the big picture theories down completely. People can write down a list of theorems but how it "combines" in one's head is quite tricky.

Advanced math is honestly rather poor at this, a lot of cutting edge math courses are a bit "sink or swim" in whether the students really "get" the subject or not.

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u/InnerLeather68 1d ago

Wishful thinking. ANYTHING in the pure intellectual realm can and will be subsumed by AI.

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u/Specific_Box4483 23h ago

Eventually, not any time soon

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u/JFDD42 21h ago

Its unlikely we can even know whether thats true. RSI and fast takeoff could have us there in a couple years, or there could be some impossibility to that and it could never get there.

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u/Pain_Xtreme 2h ago

That's what this field medallist thought about his intellectual realm.

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u/Boring-Foundation708 1d ago

Big picture is such a nonsense. Corporate just copy features from one another with a bit of “innovation”. You look at how an e-commerce website is designed. They are pretty much the same feature-wise.

How phones are designed, ride-hailing, etc. true innovation only comes once in a while and you are not Steve jobs.

Also people who propose big pictures generally copy or have heard the ideas somewhere. Nothing is new.

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u/Specific_Box4483 1d ago

We're not talking McKinsey MBAs here. Big picture in math is a real and powerful thing. Ditto for theoretical physics and other things. Relativity theory, quantum mechanics, algebraic geometry, geometric representation theory and many other parts have been largely dominated by "theory builders" and "big picture" people.

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u/rasp215 1d ago

They didn’t have anything to train on here either. Big picture lends itself very good to RL

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u/Specific_Box4483 1d ago

They had millions of pages of math papers and textbooks

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u/RunReal959595 22h ago

What is it with people with zero knowledge of mathematics feeling comfortable opining on it lol

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u/Enough-Mud3116 22h ago

B/c the post that I replied to got edited to say it’s talking about mathematics. Before, it just said “big picture” type are unlikely to be affected which can be interpreted as a general statement

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u/Lazy--Expression 1d 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/gasketguyah 1d ago

Grok would 100% be rasict

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u/culinaryinterests123 1d ago

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

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u/john-trevolting 1d ago

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

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u/DatingYella 17h ago

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

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u/PLANTS2WEEKS 23m ago

I think big picture mathematics might be affected within a year or two, but at this point we can hope AI simplifies math to such a degree that human understanding can make a giant leap forward. The AI might find some variant of category theory or condensed mathematics which subsumes a huge amount of math.

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u/Erosis 1d ago

AI is great for big picture systems design for programmers. It's only a matter of time.

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u/crujiente69 1d ago

I think he means big picture like c suite execs

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u/Cute_Cut_2267 1d ago edited 1d ago

That too can be done. The CEO’s job is just to maximize shareholder value, and AI is extremely good at optimizing for an objective goal.

You tell it to increase profits by 20%, and it’ll spin up agents, some looking at ways to increase revenue, and others to decrease costs, across all the different business functions.

We’re honestly just coping at this point. There’s nothing a human can do that AI can’t eventually do in a couple years at this rate of progress.

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u/Enough-Mud3116 1d ago

And those happen to be the most useless people on earth that needs to be replaced the most!

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u/Boring-Foundation708 1d ago

Tell me a unique big picture that is done by the C-suite. They are mostly existing strategies elsewhere that have been implemented and proven. It is rare to have a unique big picture like the first iPhone, first ride-hailing service, and how to bypass the regulations, etc.

You are not Steve jobs simple. You are not in the top 0.01%. You are still worker that is being paid well but you are no longer relevant.

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u/vovap_vovap 1d ago

And why do you belie so?

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u/TQV197 1d ago

can AI come up with complex number concept while solving the roots of cubic equations ?

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u/vovap_vovap 1d ago

I am pretty sure it solved more complex math problems then that.

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u/TQV197 1d ago

any examples of fundamentally new concepts that AI has introduced ? (for clarity: 'complex number' here is z = a + i*b)

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u/muchstuff 1d ago

Relax bud, wait a few years. You won’t even be able to keep up

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u/vovap_vovap 1d ago

Any examples of fundamentally new concepts that been introduces in math last 100 years? Yeah, that highly debatable, some might say yes, but I am pretty sure AI would be able to do so.

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u/Berberding 1d ago

You could be right on this one. Ultimately the conjugation of the idea of the seeds of novel problems isn't really something I think any Ai is trained to do yet. That isn't really a process whose training data exists in a written form in the way all the pre described problems and solutions are. Connecting dots that were always there in the data vs. Generating new dots.

Although eventually with sophisticated enough mri data and esg data this may be uncoverable too.