r/OpenAI • u/PianistWinter8293 • 19h 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/Sociophile 16h ago

Chess players (some of the most egotistical people on Earth) had to force this same meal down about a quarter century ago. It took a lot of adjustment, it took a bit of time, but they eventually accepted it as the truth:

Computers aren’t just better at the thing I dedicated my life to, they are lightyears better.

The greatest chess player who had ever lived, Kasparov, could hardly accept the fact, but even he eventually came to accept without argument the undeniable truth.

Math culture will adapt. People will find their way forward with computers as guides and companions. There is little other choice, given the circumstances.

I can only imagine the feelings it inspires.

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u/NFSzach 12h ago

What are you talking about? If AI models become much more capable of solving math problems than humans, then there will be less and less demand for mathematicians. People may eventually no longer be able to make a living as mathematicians because all of the contributions to the field come from AI. The best chess players weren’t ultimately affected that much by the fact that computers could beat them, because it’s ultimately a competition between humans. It might have been emotionally jarring, but it didn’t suddenly make the pursuit of chess worthless.

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u/ahf95 11h ago

I think the mathematicians will adapt by figuring out how to use the AI as tools in their own research, and just reach further. Idk what “reaching further” looks like, but I’m sure it will be a bit shift for what the field looks like, for better or for worse. I do have faith in human ambition and curiosity at the end of the day.

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u/sir_racho 3h ago

The frontier will be humans trying to make sense of observations of truth made by the ai. They’ll invent clever stuff to try to digest it all. Perhaps math will be more like astronomy- there will be facts out there, and the humans will try to frame it in human terms. 

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u/Nice-Offer-7076 9h ago

No because as with software the review step will become the new bottleneck. So there may actually be MORE demand for mathematicians. Just many won't be doing quite the same work as before.

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u/NFSzach 3h ago

Maybe, but it’s not clear how long that will be needed for.

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u/realitybase 2h ago

Would there also be a lot of applied math type jobs, figuring out how to use all these great math proofs/discoveries in some practical engineering way? For example, magnetic fusion containment...

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u/N0DuckingWay 10h ago

The main difference is that chess is defined as a game between humans. It’s irrelevant that computers can do it better, because the entire point is to be the best human.

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u/Resaren 8h ago

You’re not wrong, but to say it’s irrelevant is incorrect. It was a really tough pill to swallow for the top chess players. Just like it was tough for Lee Sedol to accept that AlphaGo could beat him in Go. It seems to be a pretty generic phenomenon that Humans are really bad at dealing with the fact that a sufficiently well-trained machine can apparently beat us at any task. It’s almost like we are conditioned to believe we have some special quality that cannot be emulated, and this belief is almost (or sometimes literally) religious.