“I cried”: a mathematician in despair in the face of artificial intelligence which reduced his field of research to nothing

During a conference organized on Thursday, October 8 by the Mathematical Society of France, Hugo Duminil-Copin, 2022 Fields medalist (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in mathematics) and specialist in probability as well as statistical physics, confided to having “cried in the night”, so much so that he woke up his daughter, when he discovered that the American artificial intelligence company OpenAI had published nearly 719 manuscripts which would have solved several mathematical problems, reports Le World. The researcher believes that AI has “annihilated” his field of research.

Mathematical demonstrations generated in just a few hours

On Tuesday, October 6, the company OpenAI announced that its latest artificial intelligence model had solved 370 mathematical problems. Nearly 4,000 problems were submitted to the OpenAI tool, now capable of generating demonstrations in just a few hours, whereas researchers often had to spend years on it. Among these problems, sixteen concern the field of study of Hugo Duminil-Copin.

If the researcher does not question the potential value of these discoveries, he does however intend to get down to reading the more than 3,500 pages produced by the AI ​​devoted to his research objects. “I don’t really want to read this evidence, because doing so doesn’t have the same flavor as if it had been written by humans whose faces I know,” however declared Hugo Duminil-Copin, who made OpenAI promise, after the publication of a collective column, that the company would work with an international advisory committee based at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton.