International Mathematical Union endorses warning about tech industry influence.
Mathematicians warned against rising tech industry influence in a declaration describing the many challenges that AI poses to mathematics research. The timing of the declaration comes two weeks after OpenAI publicized one of its AI models as having disproved an 80-year-old mathematical conjecture in geometry.
The declaration was developed by a working group of 16 researchers over eight months following a conference held at Leiden University in the Netherlands in September 2025. Published on June 2, 2026, the resulting Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics has been endorsed by the International Mathematical Union—the international non-governmental organization that hosts conferences and oversees the most prestigious prizes in mathematics such as the Fields Medal.
“Mathematicians should find it quite striking that tech companies are suddenly interested in their work,” said Kevin Buzzard, a mathematician at Imperial College London, in a statement. “The Leiden Declaration is a well-thought-through response to what is currently happening, as AI continues to disrupt this space.”
The Leiden Declaration, which has already drawn hundreds of signatories, warns that recent AI developments are threatening “characteristic values” of mathematical research, “often in ways that disproportionately affect students and early-career mathematicians, and hence the long term future of the discipline.”
...read more at arstechnica.com
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Mmm... all this discussion of values-alignment seems pretty squishy for mathematicians. A statement is either true or it's not, and a proof is either valid or it's not. Doesn't matter whether a machine did it or a human.
I wonder how commonplace this point of view is, or whether the majority of mathematicians are more accepting of AI.
The issues they bring up about AI slop are real (e.g. how to deal with easy to generate but hard to verify submissions). But the rest of the stuff like whether the tech companies' values are aligned, or what impact it might have on early career mathematicians, seems squishy.
Someone will have to instruct these LLMs and verify what comes out. So I'd say there's more to learn, more to develop, more to jump into. And if you're still young, this will be much easier to do than when you're mid-career.
So I'd not fear for the youngsters, even if right now fomo is keeping purses a bit tight. I'm more worried that this kind of "resistance" will have the ultimate worse effect: first denial, then battle, then capitulation. Better to learn, even if you're skeptical... I'm skeptical.
I'm not too worried for mathmaticians yet. Copilot can't even consistently add numbers off a spreadsheet file yet.
CoPilot is the most retarded integration, it's clippy meets autocorrect. I am not sure if that is representative. And MS isn't generous with what they integrate in terms of models either.
Instead, GPT being trained to solve complex math problems has been a thing for nearly a year. I still don't get why they went that route but they did. I understand the fear. It's just not a rational fear imho.
Marketing? Makes for good stories every other month.
Coding was already taken by Anthropic, they had to find their own niche?
And it's probably easy to train them on this with the vast body of solved problems available in math olympiades and other archives?
Seems to me that that's as lazy as your average underskilled llm enjoyoor that simply has no idea what they are doing so they just yolo their time away. Its related to the AGI vision where it doesn't matter what it does because it will become sentient and succeed humanity, and we need to personally make trillions now so that we can maybe escape the fate of everyone else.
Except, no one believes that bs anymore. Which is probably why Anthropic beat OpenAI to now be the world's most overvalued startup.
Too much fearmongering. Not enough results. But I'm just a simple human being. I dislike liars. This means I will never be a billionaire, probably not even after hyperinflation.
It was probably seen by MS as an easy money grab on existing subscribers. "Look we've added AI to Office360! Our new and improved service is worth the upcharge!"
Clippy++ 😂
Terence Tao, one of the bigshots in mathematics these days, is a big proponent of the use of AI in his research. Here a recent video/article on this: https://www.startuphub.ai/ai-news/ai-research/2026/terence-tao-ai-is-reducing-cognitive-friction-in-math
Thanks, I'll check it out.
PS: Outsourcing isn't generally reducing friction, it's basically scoping it out, but luckily, that's a nit.
You can probably let your LLM summarize his thoughts on this scattered all over his blog. That guy is a machine in terms of scientific and scientific-adjacent output.
LLM summarization is pointless if you don't intend to read it.
Have you seen an increase in AI slop in articles you had to review, in your field?
As a referee, it's not too bad for now in my field, the underlying science is still usually sound, even though I get annoyed at times, yet relieved that I don't have to read broken English anymore.
For editors, I heard, it's getting bad, and they can barely find referees anymore. But the system was already breaking before AI, AI is just accelerating it.
Honestly, all this hype just pumps up AI. Acting like this just proves AI is on the right track. It's straight-up free marketing for it!
It just sounds to me like they don't want anyone looking under their rug.
A little late to the party but the meme still stands 🙌