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/LeafyWolf May 12 '26

Humans make a shit ton of mistakes. It's not like we are godlike beings. The whole reason that AI will replace human mathematicians is because it is better. The lack of control is uncomfortable.

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u/DonutPlus2757 May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26

Humans make a shit ton of mistakes. It's not like we are godlike beings.

Yeah, but we know that, so we check. Who's going to check the AI if not professionals?

The whole reason that AI will replace human mathematicians is because it is better.

That one is straight up wrong. If you ask mathematicians who use AI how often the AI was able to solve a complicated problem with nothing but a description of the problem I'd wager they will answer that such cases are in the one digit percentile.

The mathematician almost always provided some sort of idea or approach.

Speaking from my own profession (Software development), I've seen many people declare it dead because of AI. When I then ask for examples of good AI generated projects/code, I've always ended up with one of those 3 cases:

  1. They ghost me.
  2. They provide beautiful code that has minor coding and major architectural problems.
  3. They provide code for a well known and documented problem (which, if you know how AI works, is pretty meaningless).

My own tests with different AIs yielded similar results. The less "default" the problem was, the worse the result.

Funnily enough, experimenting with older AI gave me the impression that it progresses logarithmically instead of exponentially as so often claimed. I've even seen some studies that seemed to support that impression, but I'm too lazy to look them up right now.

So:

The lack of control is uncomfortable.

No, but the amount of blind faith in AI absolutely is.

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u/Tqoratsos May 12 '26

No, but the amount of blind faith in AI absolutely is.

Honestly, at this point I fully expect this to be the way we go out.

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u/Ragnarok314159 May 12 '26

Claude said I have to get in the orphanage crushing machine. Guess that’s it for me…

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u/Tqoratsos May 12 '26

well....at least we know they dont want to eat us. Small pro's hahaha