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This does not quite fall under culture wars, but I thought it's still relevant given that it's a big story.
On October 6, OpenAI released a large batch of mathematical results, with more than 700 manuscripts covering hundreds of problems: Sharing AI progress in mathematics.
This has led to another round of controversy and discussion about AI making mathematicians obsolete or disrupting research programs that people have spent years working on. The Verge covers some of these reactions in “Mathematicians will need years to make sense of OpenAI’s latest drop”.
Many of the results are still being checked, but the release has called into question if mathematics can survive as a profession, or what purpose it serves if machines can outpace humans. Research programs have supposedly been gutted by these results. "Careers ruined," as the narrative goes. I think that is an exaggeration or overreaction. There are thousands of mathematicians and their interests are very wide ranging. The odds of someone's research program or problem being "solved" by AI are very small.
I don't see anything changing much. The status quo of journals and academia will remain intact even with rapid progress in AI, save for the occasional breakthrough in an unsolved problem. What is overlooked or ignored is the massive gap between cotemporary research-level math vs. LLM-produced math. A math PhD program, especially from a good school, teaches or guides future researchers towards productive areas of research that are of interest to the "math community," rather than results that are merely "personally interesting". AI cannot recreate such communities or networks.
AI is great for generating computation-laden results on-the-fly, but research-level math is more concerned with abstractions and relations between them, than crunching. I recall one example where ChatGPT’s Astra program tried to pass off a finite computational cutoff as a “theorem.” Um, you can't do that unless you prove that the bound is sufficient.
To test this, I produced some AI papers which I thought were great and novel, and the AI said so, and journals rejected them (although others are still pending at various stages of peer review). I had some knowledge in said area and could assess novelty, but still not good enough. I don't see laypeople doing better in this regard, although could be wrong. I ran my ideas through the Ai and got 12 papers out of it, which saved considerable time had I written them myself. It also found non-obvious connections and results. I am really satisfied with the results, but does this meet the bar for publication? Time will tell. I bet not.
Also, success is heavily dependent on the prompt. It's not as easy as blindly prompting something. I made a post about that https://greyenlightenment.com/2026/10/11/the-nuance-the-math-debate-is-missing/ I suspect many of these successful proofs were prompted by experts who knew what to look for, rather than just naively trying. What is touted by the media as an AI breakthrough, may involve surgically precise prompting in the background by an expert in said field.
Alluding to the "airplane meme," there is also survivorship bias: you don't see all the failed attempts with AI . Sometimes it works great, but other times hit or miss. Presumably , the "top unsolved problems" have been queried by frontier models and using large token budget, with few proofs to show for it (save for the Open AI "dump").
It would be cool to see AI truly shake -up math and breathe new life into ignored areas, but that is not going to happen, imho. But I do see AI leading to a 2-track system of decentralized preprints and GitHub repositories of AI-produced results, alongside established academia and journals. They will coexist, rather than the later being obsolete. Overall, mathematicians don't have to fear losing their jobs anytime soon (unless of course you happen to have the precise problem you are working on scooped by AI, and even then, your skills would presumably transfer to new problems.
I was hoping someone would post about this. I have a few reactions.
Solving math problems is a fairly low risk way to demonstrate Ai models ability to solve these sorts of problems. I can’t be the only one to wonder: if it can solve obscure math problems, I wonder what it could do with physics? Apparently nothing really changes when you solve these 700 math problems. But if you solve 100 physics problems, you may wind up with some commercially valuable or dangerous tech. Seems unlikely they would dish it out so readily. People seem to have made this assumptions that we’ve hit the limits of new physics. Anyone claiming interesting effects or results is a crank and it’s all fantasy. Perhaps that assumption will hold up with AI, but perhaps not. It seems to me there’s a chance that the breakthroughs have already happened this year, but they haven’t been released yet.
The reactions from many mathematicians have been a sight to behold. These sorts of intelligent academics truly behave like the world owes them something. By and large they are an unsympathetic bunch that I personally will enjoy watching them be made obsolete. There was one guy on Reddit, who turned out to be a young postdoc, giving the same tired routine that I see from so many of them. Bemoaning way that OpenAi released the work. Complaining that it’s a pile of papers that he will never read because it would take too long to digest and he’s got more important things to do. That perhaps if open Ai went through the proper channels and released peer reviewed articles in a real academic journal then, and only then, would the academic community accept the ideas. Maybe I’m generalizing too much from one guy, but I think this is a common refrain from these academic types.
I can’t wait to see how physicists react when the time comes.
Yeah, apparently the Teller-Ulam design for a Hydrogen bomb relies on some clever insights and is not fully public. So it seems plausible that there are some really dangerous ideas out there, ready for an AI to discover.
Agreed.
Well I think they are used to owning mathematics like a medieval guild. Which makes sense (or at least used to make sense) given that you need gatekeepers to keep out idiots and cranks.
FWIW I have a professional physicist in my family and he is pretty much resigned to the idea of studying physics out of love for learning more about the way the universe works. Which I guess is a good attitude, but if it were me I would be kind of disappointed if I suddenly had effectively no chance of discovering and publicizing something significant. Because the AI is going to beat me to the punch.
I suppose one option available to physicists (but not available to mathematicians) is to keep their experimental data to themselves for a year or two so that they have a chance to analyze it with their own AI in a proprietary way.
I'm not sure if that would be enough. Einstein famously didn't need experimental data to come up with relativity, he just thought about it really hard.
That's the exception rather than the rule. I've heard it said, for example, that science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science.
We still don't really know how many pharmaceuticals work.
In general, theoretical knowledge flows from experimental data and not vice versa. And even Einstein was not operating in a vacuum.
That’s because throughout almost all of human history, technology preceded science. One of the prevailing secular dogmas people have in the 21st century is the assumption that science drove technology, when in reality it’s the other way around; and science comes in after the fact and explains how it works.
As a side note to Einstein, not many people know among relativity experts, aspects of his theories are still hotly debated in niche areas as it relates to other aspects of physics relativity is related to. Just as there are a dozen or so some odd interpretations of quantum mechanics, there are different interpretations of general and special relativity as well; especially when you get to debates about cosmic time and absolute simultaneity. The tensed, neo-Lorentzian; “A-theory” interpretation of special relativity overcomes some of the very difficult problems implied by the EPR paradox in ways the orthodox B-theory interpretation we use today doesn’t.
IIRC, Einstein didn't win the Nobel Prize for relativity because many people at the time considered it to be in the realm of philosophy rather than science.
I certainly didn't know that!
Most people aren’t aware of it and the arguments are often too complex for the average/uninitiated layman. Unless you’re someone who makes heavy use of the theory professionally or in your day-to-day, it isn’t really relevant to know about in most cases.
One of the quirks of Einsteinian relativity is that it doesn’t disprove the existence of absolute space, but rather the foundations of the theory presuppose its non-existence; because the claims of the theory of special relativity which says that absolute space doesn’t exist, rests on the untenable assumptions of the verificationists of the school of Logical Positivism. The ontology of space-time becomes wholly reduced to what our measurements tell us. Einstein simply redefined simultaneity in terms of clock synchronization by light signals.
Per the earlier point about Lorentz I was making, Lorentzian relativity is fully equivalent Einsteinian relativity and the cutting edge of physics is actually more palatable to the former view of relativity than the latter. The experimental evidence that was produced by Bell’s Theorem actually suggests that relations of absolute simultaneity do exist, because the implications of the experiment says that in order to explain the results, one of two things has to be true:
There are faster than light causal influences between particles.
Particles are somehow non-causally correlated, so both particles instantaneously take on determinate properties.
In layman’s terms what that means is: the relativity of simultaneity postulated by the special theory of relativity has to be given up. It’s why Bell himself wrote when he was reviewing the implications of the experiment that there actually may be an “aether.” It’s not without problems though, since Lorentz frames implies things can go backwards in time, etc.; but there’s a real causal sequence that’s defined in the aether. And so Bell’s Theorem marked out a massive division between the two different interpretations of special relativity that’s still very much debated today. What it all ultimately means is that if action at a distance does occur, you have to give up Einstein’s interpretation of special relativity and return to Lorentz interpretation and also restore Newton’s concept of absolute space-time. You don’t have to give up the mathematical formalism, only Einstein’s interpretation of it.
These aren’t the only debates as such, but you get the gist of it.
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