OpenAI's AI Solves 10 Open Math Problems, and Mathematicians Are Coping
Mathematics Without Mathematicians
OpenAI announced that an unreleased model solved ten open problems in mathematics, a milestone that has mathematicians and observers scrambling to rationalize its implications. The author, a software engineer, dismantles common coping strategies—like claiming humans will direct or teach the AIs—arguing that AI will surpass human taste, teaching, and even architectural skills in math. He warns of a future where humans can't understand frontier math or the technology built on it, and compares the situation to chess, noting math's material utility makes AI mathematicians far more disruptive. He concludes with a sobering note on the social context of intellectual work and the choice to obsolete ourselves.
The result is that we will live in a demon-haunted world, full of marvelous devices whose operation we will not understand, based on engineering principles we will not understand, discovered using formalisms we will not understand.