In recent months, OpenAI has stunned the mathematical community by publishing hundreds of math findings. Many of these proofs, spanning number theory, theoretical computer science, and logic, had stumped the world's best mathematicians for decades, or even centuries. The reaction has been a mix of indignation, astonishment, and sorrow.
"Tuesday night, I cried and it woke up my daughter," said Hugo Duminil-Copin, recipient of the 2022 Fields Medal, after OpenAI's October release. "They have annihilated my field of research." Steven Strogatz, a mathematician and author at Cornell University, said he literally cried when he spoke to Wired weeks earlier. "People are using language like 'they're strip-mining our subject' or 'they're nuking the landscape,'" he said. "The feeling is disorientation. I'm discombobulated some days. I'm exhilarated some days. And there is enormous grief."
The author argues that today's mathematicians are weeping because the machine smashed their tower first. Tomorrow, physicists, economists, illustrators, or writers may face the same loss. While not believing hundreds of millions of jobs will vanish within five years, the author notes that a rapidly improving technology producing intelligence is destined to collide with a modern sensibility that prizes human intellect and often equates it with purpose, dignity, and self-worth.
To explore this future, the author turns to a broader question: what makes humans special? Intelligence and sociality are often cited, but other species share both. What sets humans apart is how these capacities multiply each other. Humans imitate with uncanny fidelity, then tinker, and social groups spread this process across generations, so each discovery becomes the floor for the next.
Science embodies this compounding process as both a craft and a conversation. It is also a social game, both collaborative and adversarial. Newton's "standing on the shoulders of giants" captures this, and the grief mathematicians feel reflects how deeply their work is tied to human identity.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing