He has a Fields medal – often called the Nobel prize of mathematics – to name just one of his many accolades. So when he says that OpenAI’s recent blockbuster mathematical breakthrough is indicative of how big technology companies are negatively affecting the field, people are likely to listen. This week, OpenAI announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the toughest and most enduring puzzles in mathematics.
It is one of the Millennium Prize Problems, so solving it comes with a $1 million reward. The news is the latest in a string of increasingly stunning and rapid advances in mathematics that have been building in recent months. Why is there controversy around OpenAI’s Millennium Prize maths breakthrough?
But Tao, who is based at the University of California, Los Angeles, says the way in which discoveries are being made and “dumped” on the mathematical community may actually harm the field. There has always been competition among mathematicians to be first, he says, which was fine because mathematics was so difficult that it created a natural brake to stop things getting out of hand. Tao fears that new findings will keep landing at an increasing pace and that there will be no time to absorb the results, fully understand them, put them into textbooks and teach them to students.
This means the staggering ability of AI to bring us new mathematics could actually harm the field, instead of boosting it. Mathematics needs to overcome five hurdles in order to become useful, he says. First, it needs to be created, then checked, explained, accepted and finally digested into the corpus of work that is taught to the next generation.
He says AI firms are only concerned with the first two. As an example, he points to the situation surrounding Tristan Buckmaster at New York University and Levent Alpöge at AI company Anthropic. They had been “working slowly on some very nice results” around Navier-Stokes and had developed a solution to a close cousin, and a stepping stone on the way to a full solution, the Euler equations.
But they say they were forced to suddenly rush out papers – which mathematicians told New Scientist lacked the clarity they would normally expect – once they found out that OpenAI had overtaken them. Ironically, OpenAI only began working on the Navier-Stokes problem once it heard rumours of Buckmaster and Alpöge’s work. I made a free AI chatbot solve a decade-long maths problem in 13 minutes Tao says that what has developed is a race that benefits nobody (except perhaps the marketing departments of AI companies), erodes clarity and prioritises who is first over who is accurate, clear and concise.
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