Fields Medal winners warn AI race threatens math

Twenty-five winners of the Fields Medal have warned that the rush by AI companies to solve famous unsolved mathematics problems risks lasting harm to the field.

The joint letter, signed by mathematicians including Terence Tao and published on his blog Friday, said the goals of AI companies and the mathematical community are “severely misaligned” and that the trend poses “a general threat to intellectual work.”

The signatories range from Pierre Deligne, who won the medal in 1978, to Yu Deng, who was honored this year. They said solving problems is a tool for developing conceptual understanding and insight, and that those processes take time and human interaction.

The letter followed OpenAI's announcement Tuesday that an unreleased model had solved the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, after an 88-hour effort involving thousands of AI agents working in parallel.

Hours before OpenAI's announcement, NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic's Levent Alpoge released AI-assisted work on related equations. Buckmaster accused OpenAI of seizing on the problem after word of his research spread and of copying an unusual approach he and Alpoge had spent months developing. OpenAI denied having access to their work.