Fields Medalist Jacob Tsimerman announced at the award ceremony that he will soon join OpenAI to conduct AI safety research.Author and source: The Washington Post
Jacob Tsimerman, who just won the Fields Medal last month, announced at the award ceremony that he will soon join OpenAI to work on AI safety research.
In early August, he convened around 40 mathematicians at OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco with research scientist Sébastien Bubeck for a closed-door summit, one of whose talks was titled “The End of Mathematics.”
Sébastien Bubeck, research scientist at OpenAI
Speaker and University of Toronto professor Daniel Litt said:
It is possible that we eventually end up in a world without high-quality mathematical research and the complete disappearance of human mathematical expertise.
He believes extreme outcomes are unlikely, but mathematicians must take action.
MIT mathematician Drew Sutherland put it more directly and coldly:
Perhaps we are just the canaries in the coal mine, and mathematicians are the first to suffer.
Mathematics has been chosen as a testing ground for AI because it serves as a proxy indicator for high-level cognitive ability—what can be achieved in mathematics will eventually be replicated in other domains.
AI is currently performing calculations in bulk.
The dense release of results served as the immediate backdrop for this summit.
In May, an unreleased OpenAI model disproved the unit distance conjecture.
This long-standing open problem regarding the arrangement of points on an infinite plane has been solved by AI using a known but difficult-to-operate technique from algebraic number theory—essentially applying tools across subfields.
At the time, Tsimerman said he would "unhesitatingly accept" this result in any journal.
This is regarded by many mathematicians as AI's first major mathematical breakthrough.
Subsequent achievements emerged in quick succession.
In August, OpenAI announced 10 new discoveries in mathematics and computer science generated by AI, spanning multiple subfields that typically take years to master.
Anthropic hasn't been sitting idle either.
Anthropic employee Levent Alpöge used Claude to construct pairs of orthogonal vectors on a 668-dimensional hypercube.
Mathematicians have long believed that such a construction exists, but no one has ever actually built it.
Alpöge announced the results by posting a 24,000-character message on X, consisting entirely of + and – signs.
Traditional mathematical research follows a fixed pipeline: seminar discussions, circulation among peers, posting on the preprint server arXiv, and publication in a journal after peer review.
AI-generated results are bypassing this pipeline.
Shenzhen-based entrepreneur Dmitry Rybin asked ChatGPT to “break through” to refute a web streaming hypothesis, pushing it to keep trying each time it failed, becoming an AI motivator.
ChatGPT eventually provided a counterexample, and after verifying it, Rybin posted a tweet. At the time, he was watching a movie with friends.
Mathematician David Bessis questioned this:
You tweet about solving a major problem while cooking pasta? Of course it will go viral.
But what happens after the flood of messages? Who will sort through all of this and figure out what’s actually going on?
Last week, Anthropic also announced that one of its employees asked the internal version of Claude to "seriously try" the Riemann Hypothesis.
The Riemann Hypothesis has remained unsolved for over a century, with a $1 million prize still unclaimed.
Under repeated prompts such as "Continue" or "Think again," the model generated a new insight on a related issue.
3,000 people signed the petition—so what?
The mathematical community's response has been divided.
In June, an open letter titled the "Leiden Declaration" was released, signed by over 3,000 mathematicians.
The letter urges researchers to use AI tools responsibly, ensuring that their results are verified and properly cited.
Another group of mathematicians has gone further, advocating for a complete rejection of AI and AI companies to preserve humanity's place in mathematics.
Bryna Kra, a mathematics professor at Northwestern University, attended the summit and is one of the 16 signatories of the Leiden Manifesto.
She said:
At its core, mathematics is about understanding results, not just proving them.
A proof that is not understood will not become part of the literature.
AI can prove statements, but can it clearly explain how it arrived at the proof?
Harvard mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood wrote a human-readable proof of OpenAI's unit distance conjecture result.
She found that top AI models share a common flaw: they elaborate excessively on simple parts and gloss over the difficult ones.
She said:
Even the top AI models cannot yet identify the most challenging parts of an argument and explain them clearly.
German mathematician Andreas Thom provided a more precise distinction.
One of the 10 new results announced by OpenAI is a novel construction of non-sofic groups, filling the gap between two papers by Thom and collaborator Gábor Kun from 2016 and 2019.
The two later published follow-up papers that simplified and expanded upon AI's findings.
Thom says:
AI is solving problems in a very intelligent and impactful way.
But the new concept only emerges after human involvement in the proof process—it is not yet something AI can achieve on its own.
Facing division, summit organizer Bubeck described four possible futures after the meeting:
Mathematics has become like software engineering, with AI enabling hundreds of people to collaborate on solving the same problem;
Become like physics, replacing particle accelerators with brute-force computing power and AI models;
Become museum curation, where AI generates the content and humans select and interpret it;
Or mathematicians collectively transition into AI safety.
Bubeck said:
We must put people, and mathematicians, first.
Mathematics only has meaning when mathematicians learn something from it.
A civilization without people is meaningless.
However, the 40 attendees did not reach a consensus.
Tsimerman said:
It is currently unclear what the mathematical community wants.
The purpose of this meeting is more to initiate a conversation than to make a decision.
He has not yet officially joined OpenAI.
A Fields Medalist choosing to work on security research at an AI company is itself a reflection of the current state of mathematics.
As for what he will do next, the next signal may be more noteworthy than the reports presented at this summit.