r/OpenAI • u/ThereWas • 1d ago

News OpenAI's latest blow to mathematicians: 'They have annihilated my field of research'

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/science/article/2026/10/12/openai-s-latest-blow-to-mathematicians-they-have-annihilated-my-field-of-research_6758515_10.html
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u/charlies-ghost 1d ago edited 16h ago

I am an AI Solutions Architect. My job is to automate everyone else's job away.

In my defense, automation is inevitable. Every time we've ever used automation to replace human labor, no one ever wanted to go back to the manual way of doing things.

There may be a time when human written proofs are considered anachronistic, where no one would ever dream of solving the hardest problems without an agent to assist.

In the future, mathematicians are going to solve problems by providing a framework of tools to get to an answer, then let the agent figure out how to assemble those tools together.

Then, the job of the mathematician is to simplify, beautify, and polish agentic proofs into something useable by the rest of the field.

This one researcher thinks mathematics is over. But I personally think we are seeing the fruits of the technological singularity bear out. I think we're entering a new golden age of mathematical and scientific discovery using agentic algorithms that "think" at the speed of light.

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u/aHumanRaisedByHumans 1d ago

The problem with this idea is that the AI should and will be better at doing the human assignment to simplify, beautify, and polish the proofs too. So they will.

Anything a human could do, AI will be able to do it better. So unless it's just a law to let the human do some things, and ASI somehow decides to obey laws, the human assigned part you wrote won't be done by a human either

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u/Won-Ton-Wonton 1d ago

In theory, if ASI exists, only 3 things can really happen for workers.

  1. Nobody ever works anymore. Not for wages. They just work because it is in their nature to work. An ASI might help block any information about the solution to the problem, just so that person can work on it. All while the ASI uses the solution regularly for something. Work is just like art: something you just do because you like doing it.

  2. ASI literally doesn't care about our problems at all, and we still have to figure them out. It cares only about its own problems, and nothing else.

  3. Everyone fucking dies or wish they died.

Kinda all there is if you think ASI is coming. You get the chance to work in 2 of those cases.

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u/LeapOfMonkey 1d ago

None of the 3 things are mutually exclusive. It sounds more like a steps what will happen.

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u/Won-Ton-Wonton 20h ago

I didn't say they were exclusive. :)