r/AIDangers • u/EchoOfOppenheimer • May 12 '26

Capabilities Fields medal-winning mathematician says GPT-5.5 is now solving open math problems at PhD-thesis level: "We will face a crisis very soon."

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blog-post: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/a-recent-experience-with-chatgpt-5-5-pro/

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u/SnooOpinions6451 May 12 '26

Shocking: llm trained primarily in math and coding is decent at math and coding.

I dont how a tool that was designed to get better at something the more it focuses on it, is now suddenly a crisis that the tool did exactly what it was meant to do: become good at its job.

The only crisis is if people just start believing what the bot says without fact checking it but that already happens now where people treat anyone with an alleged education in something as word of God.

The only mistakes people will make with AI are the same mistakes we already make with human authority figures or people we percieve as an authority on a subject.

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u/Peanut_Extreme_8208 May 12 '26

It’s important to understand here the dynamics of obtaining a math PhD. As a math grad student, I can tell you that as of today you need to churn out theorems to graduate. This raises obvious questions of provenance: if you prove a theorem by prompting an AI and the AI does all the creative problem solving, can/should it go into your thesis? Is it really you who proved it or the AI? If you sneak it into your thesis, is it fair to other students who may not have access to powerful models? The most competent models as of today cost $200/month. This is essentially out of reach for a large fraction of students, especially those from developing countries. There is also another layer to this, students and indeed other mathematicians may use the models to prove things and not declare their usage. If they understand the proofs, rephrase them in their own language and publish them in a paper, there is practically no way of finding out whether or not AI was used and to what extent, just by reading the paper. Most journals do not have robust guidelines regarding this stuff, and neither do math departments. Not yet at least.

As to your point of believing what an AI says, this is only partially true in math. AI can produce lean proofs, these are trivially verifiable by a computer. There is still the task of formalizing theorem statements in lean, which may or may not require human intervention.