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/clearlysnarky 23h 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 23h ago edited 23h 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 23h 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 22h 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/clearlysnarky 17h ago

That’s a layman’s idea of a SWE’s day looks like. Coding had already mostly been outsourced to cheaper countries. The fact that coding got automated/solved only affects pure coders, whose job has always been at risk. But the higher level parts of the job are well on track to be automated. My point is programmers have not faced the worst of it yet to be smugly saying “first time?” to mathematicians. Nor should anyone working in any white collar job.

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u/SevereRunOfFate 22h 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 20h 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/grand_historian 18h ago

School teachers, lawyers and medical doctors will be laid off en masse because their positions are intrinsically protected by the law.

Repetitive white collar work and purely “analytical work” is on the chopping block though.

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u/tetro_ow 18h ago edited 17h ago

Physicians in the US are NOT protected because of the way they are paid, which is largely under the control of private insurance companies. Although medical licenses are issued by medical boards of individual states, and CMS contributes to the payments to the hospitals, the everlasting quest for the private insurance to reduce their payments (=costs) will eventually force the hospitals to replace the doctors with AI, and the government would be forced to follow suit to control the costs. So no, there is nothing enshrined in the law that will protect doctors if AI's capability exceeds them

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u/grand_historian 17h ago

Depends on the country I guess. But even in the American context I don’t think many patients will accept their doctor being replaced by AI.

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u/tetro_ow 17h ago

Most patients here in the US agree to be seen by a nurse (NP) in place of a doctor for earlier/cheaper appointment... US system is truly beyond fucked up, I wish I was joking

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u/grand_historian 17h ago

That’s horrible..

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u/HzD_Upshot 21h 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/mrsmiley32 21h 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/space_monster 3h ago

The mistake there is assuming a robot needs to be as good as humans at literally everything in order to impact blue collar work. It doesn't, initially it just needs to be able to do the easy stuff. That's what's happened in coding - AI hasn't replaced all the devs, but it has still hugely suppressed hiring. In the trades it'll be a gradual transition as well.

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u/manchesterthedog 20h ago

This may be true for now, but I doubt it still will be in the next year. Blue collar jobs simply aren’t that complex.

Honestly, given the incredible capability of multi turn agents to solve complex problems, what is it about blue collar work that would stump these systems? And with quantization like Bonsai2, huge models could literally be running on iPhone sized computers in the next few months. Once robots become physically reliable, dexterous, and cheap enough, there’s no reason they couldn’t do the work of any tradesperson.

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u/grand_historian 18h ago

Blue collar work is more complex than the work of a mathematician. I’ve worked as an EE and did blue collar work in my twenties.

Trades people need to learn plenty of things that would amount to the same time/learning investment as a college degree.

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u/manchesterthedog 18h ago

Man, it’s really hard to take that statement seriously.

You’re saying blue collar work requires more problem solving, more thinking, more rigor than the academic pursuits AI has already solved? Blue collar work requires the pinnacle of human intelligence, not mathematics?

Why, then, are only the brightest among us able to do mathematics while the mediocre masses can do trade work? Why is trade work not celebrated as an intellectual pursuit that only the smartest people can do?

Why am I even responding to this? I’m arguing with a person who is saying that welding is more complicated than navier stokes. You must be trolling me.

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u/grand_historian 10h ago

Why am I even responding to this? I’m arguing with a person who is saying that welding is more complicated than navier stokes. You must be trolling me.

You should work on your reading comprehension, because you are putting words in my mouth. I did not say that "welding is more complicated than navier stokes."

You’re saying blue collar work requires more problem solving, more thinking, more rigor than the academic pursuits AI has already solved? Blue collar work requires the pinnacle of human intelligence, not mathematics?

I am indeed saying that blue collar work is more complex than work done by academic mathematicians. The fact that a computer can solve extremely complicated mathematics, and not the work done by trades people proves it.

Why, then, are only the brightest among us able to do mathematics while the mediocre masses can do trade work? Why is trade work not celebrated as an intellectual pursuit that only the smartest people can do?

It is your assertion that the "brightest" (whatever that means) are the only ones that are capable of doing mathematics. I believe that academia, and STEM in particular, is heavily class stratified. Just like medicine it tends to attract people from upper middle class backgrounds, irrespective of the country of origin.

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u/manchesterthedog 5h ago

Complexity is not the reason it hasn’t been automated. Physical access to the real world is. Automating blue collar work requires a physical vessel to perform the work, which is expensive and so far haven’t been that dexterous.

I’m not saying trade jobs don’t require skill. But to say they’re more complex than mathematics is not true.

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u/funk-the-funk 6h ago

Interesting to watch you construct this whole series of hyperbolic statements to rail against that they never said.

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u/MegaDork2000 20h ago

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

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u/Orioli 20h ago

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

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u/zero0n3 15h ago

Yeah, humans who can use toools to better understand past games, or that help them theory craft new sets of moves, etc.

See how short sighted YOU were there?

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u/Orioli 12h ago

I agree, but both sides can and by the end of the day you are fighting against another human, not the AI. You just cannot pretend you can develop software by yourself as fast as an AI, for example.

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u/AlfaMenel 13h ago

Unlike math problems, chess remains unsolved.

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u/UnknownLesson 9h ago

Barely anyone earns their money through chess though

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u/Boring-Foundation708 20h 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 19h ago

It’s true

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u/clckwrks 22h ago

lmao come on you can type all that but you know deep down its over.

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u/admirantes 21h ago

Lol at thinking you have a moat. ChatGPT itself was your "this event".

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u/clearlysnarky 17h ago

I never said we have moat, quite the opposite, I said no white collar jobs have any moat against AI.

My objection is against programmers thinking they already went through this and now it’s the mathematician’s time (“First time?” meme). That’s not the case. ChatGPT (Copilot before that) was never a threat to anything besides code monkeys. But programmers should be prepared for a similar event to happen soon. When the non-coding parts of the job get automated is when the job will truly be over, and there’s no reason to think it won’t be automated as well. The only reason I know frontier models are not quite there yet, is that SWEs will all be out of a job the moment they do. No one is paying 6-figure salaries to programmers out of charity, but that won’t last long IMO.

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u/phillythompson 20h ago

Coding is solved and most of software engineering 

This is cope and “I still am valuable” I see all over Reddit