> internal progress on mathematics
This alone feels like a horrible new paradigm
G. H. Hardy is revolving in his grave.
"Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings: there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds." -- from A Mathematician's Apology (1940)
No wonder the scornful are upset with AI.
Like in Yes Minister, when they from a committee for a "full investigation". Gowers is on it, of course.
What I predicted 9 months ago came to pass:
> "a scenario in which a large automated proof is achieved but there would be no practical means of getting any understanding of what it means"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284897#46286785
That is precisely the concern of mathematicians (getting proof without getting the knowledge to humanity):
> But solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight. Forgetting this in the world of AI may turn the tool against the primary goal. Indeed, the mass production at faster and faster pace of "true/false" statements could destroy fertile ground instead of breathing life into new ideas.
I predict it's only going to get worse. So far, in software, all AI companies push for results that you don't necessarily need to understand (don't look at the code). I don't see any reason why they would change that posture for math.
"Your advice for making AI-obtained proof are sensible, but AI has progressed too much and I'm afraid you're obsolete and all math is now a compiler target and not an actual craft", is what I predict based on the exact same thing happening to software recently.
>In a recent open letter “A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics " [...]
Lol, why care about the opinion of a bunch of people who just became obsolete?
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You'd think they'd be able to read the room with all that artificial intelligence. This is just horrible PR. What use is the product if you're just cannibalizing your prospective market?
I'll be impressed when it solves the P versus NP problem.
It feels like publicity stunt. Of they really care about research, they would at least have given more reasonable citations in the Navier-Stokes paper.
> Initial Members of the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (opens in a new window), hosted at the Institute for Advanced Study (opens in a new window):
> ...
> Timothy Gowers (Collège de France, Cambridge)
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/why-i-didnt-sign-the...
Well perhaps we spent a bit too much time discussing the argument and neglected the incentives.
Martin Hairer signed the Fields Medallists' letter and is in the advisory board. Camillo De Lallis and Ravi Vakil both endorsed the letter and are also on the advisory board. I'm not sure what "incentives" you're talking about.
"Advisory Group"
Importantly, the group will not be responsible for advising us on how to pace our internal progress on mathematics.I guess the OpenAI board was an advisory group too.
Importantly, our board will not be responsible for advising us on anything.Again, internal and external are two different things.
They can solve whatever problems they like, and they can use those findings internally however they like. I think the advice is on how to disclose the findings to the public without as much uproar as our previous debacle.
There are three big things in this announcement it seems.
> In addition to resolving the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem , this model has now resolved more than 100 long-standing open problems across most areas of mathematics.
Rumor was they were sitting on the solution to the Hodge conjecture. I wonder if thats one of these.
> The group will advise on the review and communication of emerging results.
With hundreds of results, and the seeming exponential vertical from earlier in summer (10 major results from Astra, now hundreds...) I do wonder how exactly such a group decides to disseminate results. If it will instantly bottleneck. I mean I checked their site and it seems to be a google form asking for opinions.
> Importantly, the group will not be responsible for advising us on how to pace our internal progress on mathematics.
Spicy. I think the super intelligence benchmark for me is P vs NP. That one I know is proper hard and feel it in my bones.
In related notes I watched a panel of mathematicians discuss AI recently on YouTubes. Specifically the hlf26 one. [0]. I also watched Terrence Taos recent one on SAIR [1]. In addition to a few others like Tom Rocks and Martin Hairer [2]. Whats abundantly clear is that no one has any answers to what this means for the future of mathematics. They all waffle about what anyone is going to be doing in a few years.
[0] https://youtu.be/H7_d_sgui6o
It's funny coz this was what humans were supposed to be doing in techno-utopia, while AI does all the boring stuff. I don't think many predicted art and theoretical math would be first to fall to the machines.
The next few years are gonna be very rough for the human exceptionalism crowd.
In fairness this is the boring stuff for a lot of people. :-)
> Rumor was they were sitting on the solution to the Hodge conjecture
I think someone at OpenAI (Brockman?) claimed they had "made substantial progress on it", but there is a mathematician on Twitter offering a $25,000 bet, with no takers, that they have not solved it, and that the "substantial progress" they have probably made would still leave them a lot further from a solution than they imagine.
I also see someone else on Twitter claiming to have used AI to understand what the Hodge conjecture is. :)
I really wish OpenAI would fire their PR department (incl. mathematicians), and concentrate on trying to build AGI, or RSI, or generate tons of money, or whatever they are trying to do.
> there is a mathematician on Twitter offering a $25,000 bet, with no taker
OpenAI spent $15 mil working on Navier Stokes.
So you're saying OpenAI not taking a $25k bet is proof of something?
Advisory groups, especially ones stacked with prominent individuals, are where concepts go to die. They’re taken straight from the financial services playbook. Anyone remember all those climate/finance advisory groups from 2020/21? They’re all defunct now, having achieved nothing.
And the IAS in particular is an interesting choice given a community understanding that it prefers contemplation over problem-solving (e.g., paragraph 2 of this excerpt from Surely You're Joking -- https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/52/2/dignified.htm)
I don’t think Chinese models care one iota about any of these advisory groups. Even if they’re one year behind the curve, a year or two is a piss drop in the grand scheme of things.
Who knows if they are behind or not?! Things like advanced math and advanced hacking require you to put a ton of effort into specifically training for those skills, and I've not seen any indication that the Chinese AI companies are interested in doing that - they seem more business focused.
Mathematics has enough cultural capital within the AI companies that they get to have this "advisory board".
Nobody else is getting that. When/If the severe impacts on labor materialize, workers won't get an advisory board. They will just get fired, and the companies will celebrate it as efficiency wins.
I think it's time to get very very real about regulation/taxation. Token/Compute sales tax that gets redistributed as UBI?
Unfortunately the general population are going to have to hurt more before they begin being open to those options, assuming they don’t try to kill ai in general.
Mathematics is just one of the first fields where models are better than humans and it is inconfutable.
Workers will get many boards for sure, you are underestimating unions and protests, it just won't be accepted that there isn't any job for people. The change will be diluted, to try to make economy absorb it.
> inconfutable
What a seriously cool archaic word.
> This group came together after OpenAI approached some of its members about establishing an external advisory board. In agreement with OpenAI, they decided to create an independent group and invite others to join.
More like these are the people who didn't refuse
It's fine to refuse, but cry to yourself later when OAI ignores you.
Kinda like people that don't vote because the system doesn't work anyway, then complains when it gets worse.
[delayed]
The first field field has fallen to AI.
I wasn't convinced until the mathematics community started responding, openly, with severe distress.
What will be next?
What if I told you that... Most math research was useless anyway. AI is going to expose a lot of grift.
Most research isn't useful. Research on average is extremely useful. Great ideas are rare, and we don't know in advance where they are.
If you do know, let me know and I'll lead a round for your VC fund. I for one would never have predicted that abstract topology would lead to nuclear weapons within a few generations.
Mathematicians never claimed that it was useful. It is up to you to find a use for it.
There is not a lot of money in maths… what grift are you talking about?
What a stupid, anti-intellectualism take. Quite literally every single thing you use in your daily life is deeply ingrained in the research of mathematicians for literally thousands of years.
The list is so long I couldn't even begin to describe
GP said "most" not "all".
Not knowing that difference strikes me as much more <I'm not gonna repeat what you said but we all know it>.
I agree with GP most Math is human slop, anyway. But to Math's favor, that slop is needed as once in a blue moon a great breakthrough comes off it.
The slop has been automated now, the humans proven obsolete, AI will drive all Math research going forward.
Adapt or cope (and die).
No fucking way, I didn't realise. I was definitely talking about calculus.
20th century physics is heavily based off of abstract algebra (symmetry) and pretty much all of CS is based off of discrete mathematics.
Not sure what you're trying to say. Any time someone wants to actually make a system and not a pile of spaghetti or inactionable philosophy (for all that I love philosophy), they reach for mathematics in some way, shape, or form.
Also something I didn't know. We learn something new everyday and I certainly didn't study CS or anything. Also describes most of the research that gets funded these days.
In all seriousness, I don't think even AI hallucinates this much. We should genuinely be concerned for society.
Alrighty man, if your worldview is, "Everything within my knowledge is the objectively correct amount of knowledge to learn, and everything outside of my knowledge is useless abstract garbage", you can live like that.
Live like that, I'm deeply concerned this man may get elected to one of the highest positions in the world!