Welcome to the AI crisis in math

Today on Decoder , I’m talking with Robert Hart, The Verge ’s London-based AI reporter, about what AI is doing to the field of mathematics and the existential crisis many lead mathematicians are having about it. OpenAI just published a set of solutions to longstanding problems in math that went off like a bombshell in the field. It caused a huge debate in the math community, and Rob spent some time talking to some of the most accomplished mathematicians of our time about it. It’s funny that AI systems are all still pretty bad at elementary school arithmetic, but getting increasingly good at very high-end abstract math. That raises some big questions for the field of advanced math. If AI can do math of this caliber, does that mean AI labs can transfer those skills to other domains? What good are academic grants and university programs training new generations of human mathematicians to identify new problems as they try to solve existing ones, if frontier models simply answer all the outstanding questions? What if all this attention around math is just a big marketing exercise for frontier AI labs, which couldn’t care less what happens to one of the oldest and most fundamental academic disciplines there is? There’s a lot here, and Robert has talked to a lot of people with a lot of views on all of it. Okay: Verge AI reporter Robert Hart on what AI is doing to math. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Robert Hart, you’re our London-based AI reporter here at The Verge . Welcome to Decoder . Thank you for having me. I am very excited to talk to you. There’s a lot going on in particular with AI and math that you recently dove into . You spoke to a lot of leading mathematicians about the crisis in mathematics due to AI. It feels like a lot, and also like there’s a lot yet to know and discover about the interaction of these two things. A full existential crisis, which is pure Decoder bait. Broadly tell us what’s going on. I think “a lot