Today on Decoder, I’m talking with Robert Hart, The Verge’s London-based AI reporter, about what AI is doing to the field of mathematics and the existential crisis many lead mathematicians are having about it.
OpenAI just published a set of solutions to longstanding problems in math that went off like a bombshell in the field. It caused a huge debate in the math community, and Rob spent some time talking to some of the most accomplished mathematicians of our time about it.
It’s funny that AI systems are all still pretty bad at elementary school arithmetic, but getting increasingly good at very high-end abstract math. That raises some big questions for the field of advanced math.
If AI can do math of this caliber, does that mean AI labs can transfer those skills to other domains? What good are academic grants and university programs training new generations of human mathematicians to identify new problems as they try to solve existing ones, if frontier models simply answer all the outstanding questions?
What if all this attention around math is just a big marketing exercise for frontier AI labs, which couldn’t care less what happens to one of the oldest and most fundamental…
There’…
