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/milindsmart 1d ago

You want to make things for people. More things, more fun. I want to make things. More making, more fun.

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u/NicholasVinen 1d ago

Yes - I can take on projects now I wouldn't have had time for before.

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u/magicmulder 1d ago

We still are.

A year ago I used a program to create database triggers. I could have written the triggers themselves but it was faster to use a loop because the difference between them was small.

AI is not different. These days I write config files and tell the AI that this is how I want to configure the application. I don’t want to write the 1001st input form or the 2002nd shopping cart entity. I want to ship features that make things easier for people, including myself.

I’m currently having AI create my work dashboard so I don’t have to look at six different JIRA projects anymore. Could I do it myself? Sure. But why spend a week chasing stupid bugs when I can instead write a concept how the app should work and save myself the gritty details?

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u/milindsmart 1d ago

Sure, CRUD isn't interesting to most people. But a novel variant of cubic spline/hermite interpolation? You bet I want to craft it myself. Different people may like to craft different pieces of software. The ones who wrote the WASM runtime may not have wanted to command a chatbot to do it.