Leading mathematicians fear AI is making their field dumber, and warn the rest of us is next
Twenty-five Fields Medal winners, including Terence Tao, warn AI companies' benchmark-driven approach to mathematics is misaligned with the discipline's purpose of understanding.
In a joint statement, 25 Fields Medal winners including Terence Tao, Peter Scholze, and Maryna Viazovska warn that AI systems solving major open problems at machine speed undermine conceptual understanding and raise severe attribution and plagiarism questions. The statement lands amid a controversy accusing OpenAI of training math models to beat researchers to a rumored partial solution of a Millennium Prize Problem. The signatories describe a general threat to intellectual work across professions and call for urgent action by mathematicians, AI companies, and society, while not seeking a ban.