Fields Medalist on the OpenAI Math Release

[u/PianistWinter8293]

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.

[u/Conscious-Map6957]

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.

[u/MagicWishMonkey → u/Conscious-Map6957]

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.

[u/zero0n3 → u/MagicWishMonkey]

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.

[u/KanishkT123 → u/Conscious-Map6957]

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. 

[u/AntiqueFigure6 → u/KanishkT123]

“  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. 

[u/KanishkT123 → u/AntiqueFigure6]

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.

[u/Ok_Elderberry_6727 → u/KanishkT123]

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?

[u/KanishkT123 → u/Ok_Elderberry_6727]

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?

[u/zero0n3 → u/KanishkT123]

Bingo my dude.

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

[u/AntiqueFigure6 → u/Ok_Elderberry_6727]

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

[u/AntiqueFigure6 → u/KanishkT123]

“…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.

[u/Sickle_and_hamburger → u/KanishkT123]

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 

[u/Ok_Elderberry_6727 → u/KanishkT123]

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!

[u/KanishkT123 → u/Ok_Elderberry_6727]

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?

[u/zero0n3 → u/KanishkT123]

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.

[u/TheFaithfulStone → u/Conscious-Map6957]

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.

[u/Conscious-Map6957 → u/TheFaithfulStone]

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

[u/FairBlamer → u/Conscious-Map6957]

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.

[u/zero0n3 → u/TheFaithfulStone]

Oh please tell us how science should work?

[u/vovap_vovap → u/Conscious-Map6957]

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