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Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence

75 points · 58 comments · js73js8

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js73js8 · 1790014096 · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://agmai.org/" rel="nofollow">https://agmai.org/
1. airstrike · 1790017696 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
  1. pixl97 · 1790021543 · focus · HN ↗
    It's fine to refuse, but cry to yourself later when OAI ignores you.
    Kinda like people that don't vote because the system doesn't work anyway, then complains when it gets worse.
    airstrike · 1790023675 · focus · HN ↗
    Sounds like a threat
    pixl97 · 1790025327 · focus · HN ↗
    Only if a threat means people don't listen to me.
franticgecko3 · 1790015707 · focus · HN ↗
The first field field has fallen to AI.
I wasn't convinced until the mathematics community started responding, openly, with severe distress.
What will be next?
1. bananaflag · 1790015824 · focus · HN ↗
  Theoretical physics
2. jfewhfuehg · 1790017322 · focus · HN ↗
  What if I told you that... Most math research was useless anyway. AI is going to expose a lot of grift.
  1. esafak · 1790017626 · focus · HN ↗
    Mathematicians never claimed that it was useful. It is up to you to find a use for it.
  2. dgellow · 1790018859 · focus · HN ↗
    There is not a lot of money in maths… what grift are you talking about?
  3. vablings · 1790019661 · focus · HN ↗
    What a stupid, anti-intellectualism take. Quite literally every single thing you use in your daily life is deeply ingrained in the research of mathematicians for literally thousands of years.
    The list is so long I couldn't even begin to describe
    jfewhfuehg · 1790019998 · focus · HN ↗
    No fucking way, I didn't realise. I was definitely talking about calculus.
    sigbottle · 1790020550 · focus · HN ↗
    20th century physics is heavily based off of abstract algebra (symmetry) and pretty much all of CS is based off of discrete mathematics.
    Not sure what you're trying to say. Any time someone wants to actually make a system and not a pile of spaghetti or inactionable philosophy (for all that I love philosophy), they reach for mathematics in some way, shape, or form.
    jfewhfuehg · 1790020865 · focus · HN ↗
    Also something I didn't know. We learn something new everyday and I certainly didn't study CS or anything. Also describes most of the research that gets funded these days.
    In all seriousness, I don't think even AI hallucinates this much. We should genuinely be concerned for society.
    sigbottle · 1790021317 · focus · HN ↗
    Alrighty man, if your worldview is, "Everything within my knowledge is the objectively correct amount of knowledge to learn, and everything outside of my knowledge is useless abstract garbage", you can live like that.
    pixl97 · 1790021627 · focus · HN ↗
    Live like that, I'm deeply concerned this man may get elected to one of the highest positions in the world!
    jfewhfuehg · 1790070496 · focus · HN ↗
    Me: "Most research that gets funded in maths is useless" You: "We use maths everyday"
    Do you see how our statements do not contradict each other?
    vablings · 1790088999 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of research; Research is not always and is not commonly a problem in search of a solution it's the other way around, people find a topic of interest and race it out to conclusion and then share findings to allow other people to apply that knowledge.
    moralestapia · 1790022792 · focus · HN ↗
    GP said "most" not "all".
    Not knowing that difference strikes me as much more <I'm not gonna repeat what you said but we all know it>.
    I agree with GP most Math is human slop, anyway. But to Math's favor, that slop is needed as once in a blue moon a great breakthrough comes off it.
    The slop has been automated now, the humans proven obsolete, AI will drive all Math research going forward.
    Adapt or cope (and die).
    cubefox · 1790062015 · focus · HN ↗
    Most research mathematics is completely useless pure mathematics. There is zero economic value in proving Navier-Stokes, the Riemann hypothesis, Goldbach's conjecture, P≠NP, the Collatz conjecture, the ABC conjecture and so on.
    Of course, large parts of science are also economically useless. Like analyzing the storms on Jupiter, or finding out what type of organism the extinct Prototaxites was.
    It's done because humans find it intrinsically interesting.
    > What a stupid, anti-intellectualism take.
    It's the other way round. What he said is true: Most research mathematics is useless. Denying this truth is stupid and anti-intellectual.
    vablings · 1790088804 · focus · HN ↗
    Sorry, historically this is just downright false. There are hundreds of examples
    <a href="https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/280530/can-you-provide-me-historical-examples-of-pure-mathematics-becoming-useful" rel="nofollow">https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/280530/can-you-prov...
    cubefox · 1790093186 · focus · HN ↗
    1. None of these are the result of proving major open pure math conjectures.
    2. It is questionable whether these examples couldn't have been invented by applied mathematicians as the need for them arose.
    3. Even if the previous point doesn't always apply and some pure mathematics turns out to be genuinely useful: that doesn't mean this happens more than very rarely such that the overall expected economic value of spending money on pure math research is positive.
  4. auntienomen · 1790024027 · focus · HN ↗
    Most research isn't useful. Research on average is extremely useful. Great ideas are rare, and we don't know in advance where they are.
    If you do know, let me know and I'll lead a round for your VC fund. I for one would never have predicted that abstract topology would lead to nuclear weapons within a few generations.
OtherShrezzing · 1790015729 · focus · HN ↗
Advisory groups, especially ones stacked with prominent individuals, are where concepts go to die. They’re taken straight from the financial services playbook. Anyone remember all those climate/finance advisory groups from 2020/21? They’re all defunct now, having achieved nothing.
1. laichzeit0 · 1790016282 · focus · HN ↗
  I don’t think Chinese models care one iota about any of these advisory groups. Even if they’re one year behind the curve, a year or two is a piss drop in the grand scheme of things.
  1. HarHarVeryFunny · 1790019986 · focus · HN ↗
    Who knows if they are behind or not?! Things like advanced math and advanced hacking require you to put a ton of effort into specifically training for those skills, and I've not seen any indication that the Chinese AI companies are interested in doing that - they seem more business focused.
2. [deleted] · 1790018781 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
3. mturmon · 1790021247 · focus · HN ↗
  And the IAS in particular is an interesting choice given a community understanding that it prefers contemplation over problem-solving (e.g., paragraph 2 of this excerpt from Surely You're Joking -- <a href="https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/52/2/dignified.htm" rel="nofollow">https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/52/2/dignified.htm)
1242asZ · 1790016085 · focus · HN ↗
Like in Yes Minister, when they from a committee for a "full investigation". Gowers is on it, of course.
kingstnap · 1790017058 · focus · HN ↗
There are three big things in this announcement it seems.
> In addition to resolving the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem , this model has now resolved more than 100 long-standing open problems across most areas of mathematics.
Rumor was they were sitting on the solution to the Hodge conjecture. I wonder if thats one of these.
> The group will advise on the review and communication of emerging results.
With hundreds of results, and the seeming exponential vertical from earlier in summer (10 major results from Astra, now hundreds...) I do wonder how exactly such a group decides to disseminate results. If it will instantly bottleneck.
> Importantly, the group will not be responsible for advising us on how to pace our internal progress on mathematics.
Spicy. I think the super intelligence benchmark for me is P vs NP. That one I know is proper hard and feel it in my bones.
In related notes I watched a panel of mathematicians discuss AI recently on YouTubes. Specifically the hlf26 one. [0]. I also watched Terrence Taos recent one on SAIR [1]. In addition to a few others like Tom Rocks and Martin Hairer [2]. Whats abundantly clear is that no one has any answers to what this means for the future of mathematics.
[0] <a href="https://youtu.be/H7_d_sgui6o" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/H7_d_sgui6o
[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/PZRb6NIki2w" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/PZRb6NIki2w
[2] <a href="https://youtu.be/G8HMa_tgM34" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/G8HMa_tgM34
1. optimalsolver · 1790017496 · focus · HN ↗
  It's funny coz this was the stuff humans were supposed to be doing in techno-utopia, while AI does all the boring stuff. I don't think many predicted art and theoretical math would be first to fall to the machines.
  The next few years are gonna be very rough for the human exceptionalism crowd.
  1. kenjackson · 1790018267 · focus · HN ↗
    In fairness this is the boring stuff for a lot of people. :-)
2. HarHarVeryFunny · 1790019266 · focus · HN ↗
  > Rumor was they were sitting on the solution to the Hodge conjecture
  I think someone at OpenAI (Brockman?) claimed they had "made substantial progress on it", but there is a mathematician on Twitter offering a $25,000 bet, with no takers, that they have not solved it, and that the "substantial progress" they have probably made would still leave them a lot further from a solution than they imagine.
  I also see someone else on Twitter claiming to have used AI to understand what the Hodge conjecture is. :)
  I really wish OpenAI would fire their PR department (incl. mathematicians), and concentrate on trying to build AGI, or RSI, or generate tons of money, or whatever they are trying to do.
  1. dist-epoch · 1790021314 · focus · HN ↗
    > there is a mathematician on Twitter offering a $25,000 bet, with no taker
    OpenAI spent $25 mil working on Navier Stokes.
    So you're saying OpenAI not taking a $25k bet is proof of something?
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790024286 · focus · HN ↗
    I wouldn't expect the person who paid the $15M bill to be the one to take the bet, but the "expect to solve/announce it soon" rumor apparently came from some OpenAI employee, so the ship seems to be leaking, and yet nothing more.
    I can see Altman sitting on 100 less famous math results waiting for the best PR opportunity to release them, but hard to see him sitting on this, risking being scooped by a competitor.
    dist-epoch · 1790060049 · focus · HN ↗
    There is no risk of being scooped. There are multiple ways of preregistering this, from timed crypto hashes, to showing the proofs to influential mathematicians before releasing them.
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790076949 · focus · HN ↗
    In the world of PR it's about appearances - who grabs the headlines.
    It this had happened and been shared with mathematicians, there would be leaks.
    mlinsey · 1790034080 · focus · HN ↗
    The company obviously would not, but no anonymous account coming forward to take the bet is at least a small signal. OpenAI is now a company of thousands of people, plus outside collaborators like this advisory group, and all those people have roommates, partners, people they go to the bar with. Leaks happen; there's a reason why people had a pretty good idea that Astra was coming out and that GPT-6-Sol is imminent.
  2. dumberquestions · 1790026928 · focus · HN ↗
    PR is important for getting investor money, which is important for making money and building AGI, I don't think they're spending millions on pure math for fun.
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790085600 · focus · HN ↗
    It's obviously for PR, but has rather backfired.
    OpenAI don't seem to have much direction. First they seemed to be concentrating on consumer with ChatGPT, while also pursuing things like image and video generation, about to get into porn (sex-chat), then they suddenly woke up to Anthropic owning the much more lucrative business/API and coding markets and dropped those distractions to compete with Anthropic instead. The whole Navier-Stokes PR debacle was also due to focusing on Anthropic (who they had heard rumor had solved it), maybe also in part jealous of DeepMind's positive AI-for-science press.
    So, is this (poorly conceived) PR a rational attempt to boost investment, or more of a case of paying too much attention to the competition?
robotpepi · 1790017432 · focus · HN ↗
It feels like publicity stunt. Of they really care about research, they would at least have given more reasonable citations in the Navier-Stokes paper.
1. nickysielicki · 1790017765 · focus · HN ↗
  Citations used to be for the benefit of the reader/reviewer, so that they could learn more. It’s clear that today citations are mostly for the benefit of whoever is being cited, so that they can farm Google scholar karma and publicity and feel good about themselves.
  If anyone wants to contribute to mathematics going forward, they should invest their time and effort into improving Lean. If the old era academics don’t care about contributing to mathematics and they just care about karma farming, then they’re just neoluddites and I don’t care if they’re upset.
jfewhfuehg · 1790017514 · focus · HN ↗
A glorified retirement home.
[deleted] · 1790017673 · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
marsven_422 · 1790018535 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
mwkaufma · 1790018548 · focus · HN ↗
"Advisory Group"
```
   Importantly, the group will not be responsible for advising us on how to pace our internal progress on mathematics.
```
1. HarHarVeryFunny · 1790020933 · focus · HN ↗
  I guess the OpenAI board was an advisory group too.
  Importantly, our board will not be responsible for advising us on anything.
2. pixl97 · 1790021401 · focus · HN ↗
  Again, internal and external are two different things.
  They can solve whatever problems they like, and they can use those findings internally however they like. I think the advice is on how to disclose the findings to the public without as much uproar as our previous debacle.
3. classified · 1790025023 · focus · HN ↗
  What can you expect when the wolf is the shepherd?
gaigalas · 1790018843 · focus · HN ↗
What I predicted 9 months ago came to pass:
> "a scenario in which a large automated proof is achieved but there would be no practical means of getting any understanding of what it means"
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284897#46286785">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284897#46286785
That is precisely the concern of mathematicians (getting proof without getting the knowledge to humanity):
> But solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight. Forgetting this in the world of AI may turn the tool against the primary goal. Indeed, the mass production at faster and faster pace of "true/false" statements could destroy fertile ground instead of breathing life into new ideas.
I predict it's only going to get worse. So far, in software, all AI companies push for results that you don't necessarily need to understand (don't look at the code). I don't see any reason why they would change that posture for math.
"Your advice for making AI-obtained proof are sensible, but AI has progressed too much and I'm afraid you're obsolete and all math is now a compiler target and not an actual craft", is what I predict based on the exact same thing happening to software recently.
anothermathbozo · 1790018866 · focus · HN ↗
> internal progress on mathematics
This alone feels like a horrible new paradigm
Certhas · 1790019258 · focus · HN ↗
Mathematics has enough cultural capital within the AI companies that they get to have this "advisory board".
Nobody else is getting that. When/If the severe impacts on labor materialize, workers won't get an advisory board. They will just get fired, and the companies will celebrate it as efficiency wins.
I think it's time to get very very real about regulation/taxation. Token/Compute sales tax that gets redistributed as UBI?
1. Firaxus · 1790021123 · focus · HN ↗
  Unfortunately the general population are going to have to hurt more before they begin being open to those options, assuming they don’t try to kill ai in general.
2. scurnus · 1790022174 · focus · HN ↗
  Mathematics is just one of the first fields where models are better than humans and it is inconfutable.
  Workers will get many boards for sure, you are underestimating unions and protests, it just won't be accepted that there isn't any job for people. The change will be diluted, to try to make economy absorb it.
  1. pfdietz · 1790022921 · focus · HN ↗
    > inconfutable
    What a seriously cool archaic word.
blurbleblurble · 1790019419 · focus · HN ↗
You'd think they'd be able to read the room with all that artificial intelligence. This is just horrible PR. What use is the product if you're just cannibalizing your prospective market?
SirMaster · 1790020347 · focus · HN ↗
I'll be impressed when it solves the P versus NP problem.
1. aroman · 1790025236 · focus · HN ↗
  Poe’s Law notwithstanding, this is a truly comical distance for a goalpost of any kind.
2. warkdarrior · 1790026605 · focus · HN ↗
  The way things are going, if OpenAI solves P vs NP, they won't tell anyone in order not to disturb the human mathematicians. We (as external to OpenAI) may end up learning this only through OpenAI actions that indirectly indicate knowledge of the P vs NP result.
piker · 1790020637 · focus · HN ↗
> Timothy Gowers (Collège de France, Cambridge)
> <a href="https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/why-i-didnt-sign-the-fields-medallists-letter/#more-7352" rel="nofollow">https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/why-i-didnt-sign-the...
Well perhaps we spent a bit too much time discussing the argument and neglected the incentives.
1. oofbaroomf · 1790023138 · focus · HN ↗
  Martin Hairer signed the Fields Medallists' letter and is in the advisory board. Camillo De Lallis and Ravi Vakil both endorsed the letter and are also on the advisory board. I'm not sure what "incentives" you're talking about.
  <a href="https://mathandai.org/" rel="nofollow">https://mathandai.org/
  1. piker · 1790026516 · focus · HN ↗
    You had me until the last part. There are obvious incentives to avoid (and advertise avoidance of) signing a paper that some perceive as hostile to OpenAI in exchange for remaining in consideration for a prestigious post endowed by OpenAI. If you "not sure" about those, then you're being quite generous.
moralestapia · 1790022517 · focus · HN ↗
>In a recent open letter “A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics " [...]
Lol, why care about the opinion of a bunch of people who just went obsolete?
pfdietz · 1790023399 · focus · HN ↗
G. H. Hardy is revolving in his grave.
"Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings: there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds." -- from A Mathematician's Apology (1940)
1. philipwhiuk · 1790077193 · focus · HN ↗
  Ramanujan's insights without proofs are almost opposite to an AI that produces proofs with insight.
2. scuppernong · 1790109257 · focus · HN ↗
  meta-commentary like this, then, is surely the work of a third-rate mind
bmitc · 1790030737 · focus · HN ↗
> Mathematics is a fundamental science
Wrong. Mathematics is not a science at all.
cantalopes · 1790031053 · focus · HN ↗
Not a word about stealing solution to the navier stokes prize problem
1. keeda · 1790033990 · focus · HN ↗
  They already amended their last statement to address it thus:
  > Following an investigation, we have confirmed that Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the two months preceding this announcement and paper on September 8, 2026, could not have influenced the system in any way, including through training.
  And clearly, if they really have solved 100s of other open problems since then, it is only more reason to believe that statement.
  1. philipwhiuk · 1790077246 · focus · HN ↗
    There are hundreds of mathematicians working on problems, probably feeding data to Codex.
    keeda · 1790117598 · focus · HN ↗
    So, the premise is that there just happened to be hundreds of mathematicians who were close to solving these hundreds of long-standing unsolved problems with Codex all in the last few months, and OpenAI trained on all their chats to scoop them?
    Well, I do suppose the probability of that is non-zero... ;-)
6gvONxR4sf7o · 1790033224 · focus · HN ↗
> The group will operate independently from OpenAI. The group will have the freedom to offer advice we have not requested, comment on OpenAI’s impact on mathematics, and make its advice public.
That seems so empty. I also operate independently from them and have the freedom to tell them things they haven't requested and comment on their impact and do so publicly. But I doesn't have any impact on OpenAI. If they're trying to say how this will actually have any impact on anything at all, they're doing a shit job.
keeda · 1790037146 · focus · HN ↗
Huh I expected this to get way more attention given the huge buzz following the Navier-Stokes drama.
fireflysentinel · 1790040224 · focus · HN ↗
I asked Fable to predict which famous open problems are not in the 100+ list. It says Goldbach, Collatz, and abc, because those would warrant their own news posts.

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