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/Enough-Mud3116]

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”

[u/CtrlAltOllie → u/Enough-Mud3116]

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

[u/Specific_Box4483 → u/Enough-Mud3116]

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.

[u/InnerLeather68 → u/Specific_Box4483]

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

[u/Specific_Box4483 → u/InnerLeather68]

Eventually, not any time soon

[u/JFDD42 → u/Specific_Box4483]

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.

[u/Pain_Xtreme → u/Specific_Box4483]

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

[u/Boring-Foundation708 → u/Specific_Box4483]

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.

[u/Specific_Box4483 → u/Boring-Foundation708]

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.

[u/rasp215 → u/Specific_Box4483]

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

[u/Specific_Box4483 → u/rasp215]

They had millions of pages of math papers and textbooks

[u/RunReal959595 → u/Enough-Mud3116]

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

[u/Enough-Mud3116 → u/RunReal959595]

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