Mathematics has been one of humanity’s most creative endeavors, akin to painting and poetry. Now, mathematicians are trying to save it from the brute force of AI.
From Suno composing uncanny elevator music to Tilly Norwood delivering customer-service-inflected one-liners, artificial intelligence has rattled creative industries. You can add math to the list after OpenAI said that, using thousands of agents, it had solved a decades-old puzzle known as the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem.
“The artists and the musicians have already gone through this,” says Juspreet Singh Sandhu, a mathematician at Colorado State University.
Despite what timed high school exams might have you believe, mathematicians aren’t focused on getting the right answer as fast as possible. In fact, contrary to math’s image as a practical subject, the development of new mathematical ideas often resembles artistic exploration, akin to inventing a game or puzzle. Mathematicians typically follow a thoughtful, deliberate process to develop their ideas. In contrast, OpenAI approached the proof with brute force, which shortcut the process in a way that threatens to undermine human understanding.
“A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns,” wrote the English mathematician G. H. Hardy in his 1940 essay, A Mathematician’s Apology. As Hardy describes it, a painter uses shapes and colors, and a poet uses words, while a mathematician constructs patterns out of ideas.
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lol, I remember seeing the post about how the music industry makes most money off live concerts now.
I wonder if we will one day pay to see mathematicians solve proofs live.
Or, it will be like chess. The human element of it will be played mostly for drama and personalities (Magnus, Hikaru, Niemann, etc).... rather than to see the actual best chess being played (which would just be watching Stockfish go against itself)
Funny, I made exactly this comparison the other day. ANd here I thought I was original??
dream on
I'm fairly certain this is a puff piece sponsored by OpenAI. Notice how it glosses over the reality of what went down (snooping on mathematicians accounts and front-running their solution combined with threats to ruin their career). Comical how it hammers on the "magical AI is disrupting everything!" trope that AI companies love as a way to muddy the waters.
It is statistically impossible that any non-paid-for journalist would write a piece on Navier-Stokes and completely avoid the controversy surrounding it.
I'm kinda surprised this case isn't bigger....I mean should anyone actually trust OpenAI after this debacle? Imagine if you were emailing your attorney from your gmail account regarding a new patent idea and google ran off and patented it before you and called you to threaten you.