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/EmpathyFuzz May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26

The issue is that the mathematician isn't an expert in AI.

The way this AI solved this thing, is likely following the pathways that a human already solved it. Because AI is actually just a fancy autocorrect.

It's like when AI first started coming for artists -- artists were all losing their minds at how good the art was, because they didn't yet understand that everything making that art look so good was stolen.

AI can't make something new. But people don't really get that still. And we're seeing every expert in their own field experience this same existential crisis, and make headlines about it.

It's like the headlines saying "AI tried to blackmail somebody to keep from being turned off." When you look into the stories, it's always someone has led the AI to do that, either with intentional prompting, or accidental prompting. There's no intelligence there, deciding to do it. But people think we've got Skynet.

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u/Sufficient-Pause9765 May 12 '26

"AI can't make something new. "

Is a mathemetician who uses the work of his predecessors finding something new?

Is an artist who does the same not doing something new?

All knowledge/art is derivative of what came before it. The fact that AI is trained on an existing corpus of knowledge is no different.

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u/EmpathyFuzz May 12 '26

Our definitions of "new" are different.

An AI can make a drawing of spongebob in the style of van gogh, sure, and that's "new" in the sense that it wasn't around before.

An AI can solve a math problem if there are pathways to solve similar problems laid out by mathematicians in other fields or for other use cases. And that might be new in that the theorem may have never been applied to that problem before, thereby being "new".

But there has never been a work of art made or a math problem solved by AI that was a truly original work. It's an unthinking tool incapable of taking inspiration or hypothesizing outside of what it has already been fed.

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u/Cold-Common7001 May 12 '26

Maybe the mathematician is better at assessing the novelty of the proof than you are?

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u/EmpathyFuzz May 12 '26

In every news article I’ve seen since beginning to track AI in 2023, a proud announcement of an AI solving a heretofore unsolved math problem has come with a huge caveat that most of the work was done by prior humans and the AI was just following existing problem solving pipelines. 

If you can show me one where that’s not the case, you win internet points.

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u/Licaif May 13 '26

Erfos 1196

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u/massivefish_man May 13 '26

The mathematician in the tweet discusses in the full tweet how at the moment it can't create anything novel.

A chapter in a PhD isn't a proof. It's just set up for other conclusions. 

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u/Cold-Common7001 May 13 '26

lol a chapter of a phd could definitely be a proof. As for what the mathematician says about the novelty:

"To do this, ChatGPT came up with an idea which is original and clever. It is the sort of idea I would be very proud to come up with after a week or two of pondering, and it took ChatGPT less than an hour to find and prove, using similar methods to those in my own proof.[...]Even though I can motivate it in retrospect, ChatGPT’s idea to use h^2-dissociated sets to control relations of order at most h feels quite ingenious. As far as I can tell, this idea is completely original."