Top mathematicians are increasingly pushing back against the tech industry’s artificial-intelligence-powered incursion into their field.
A statement released last Friday and signed by 25 winners of the Fields Medal, math’s highest prize, decries a “severe misalignment” between AI companies’ goals and those of the discipline. The declaration closed out what was perhaps the most consequential week in math’s history: last Tuesday OpenAI claimed a solution to the Navier-Stokes equations, one of the seven “Millennium Prize Problems,” considered the subject’s hardest open questions.
The declaration speaks to the breakneck pace of the ongoing race AI companies are engaged in as they attempt to solve the highest-profile open problems to demonstrate their models’ capabilities. The goal of mathematics is not only to solve problems, the declaration argues, but to advance the “conceptual understanding and insight” of the humans who practice it. This human culture is being endangered by the “mass production” of AI-generated proofs, it adds.
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“The mathematical community functions, in many ways, as a miniature version of humanity,” the statement says. “It consists of individuals using a wide variety of different approaches, joined by core values.”
Notable among the signatories is mathematician Terence Tao. For years, Tao has been publicly optimistic about AI’s entry on the math scene—he appeared in a promotional video from OpenAI just a few months ago—but recently his views have evolved in the direction of greater concern. On his blog last Wednesday, Tao reflected on “that infamous advertisement” with conflicted emotions. He lamented the current situation, which he said “has deteriorated markedly” and described as a landscape in which companies are “increasingly focused on the race to develop extremely powerful, autonomous AI technologies regardless of their actual value to society.”
Tao is not the only mathematical eminence with a rather sudden change of heart. Last week a number of concerned mathematicians, many of them at the top of their subject, launched the Association for Human Mathematics (AHM)—an effort that was underway even before the earth-shattering Navier-Stokes news.
“Sentiment has been building for a while now that the current relationship between math and AI companies is both harmful and short-sighted,” says Naomi Sweeting, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the first listed members of the AHM. “We’re trying to build a future that’s good for humans and good for mathematics.”
The new declaration and the AHM share the perspective that what’s happening in math should be seen as a test case, not some siloed conflict that the rest of us can ignore. “We see these as part of broader alignment issues impacting other scientific and creative professions,” the Fields medalists’ declaration reads, “as well as the whole of society.”
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