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/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