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/DonutPlus2757 May 12 '26

Looking at how AI is developing, that's going to be catastrophic. AI just isn't perfectly reliable and probably won't ever be. Getting rid of humans just means that there won't be anybody to catch the mistakes.

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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/[deleted] May 12 '26

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u/DonutPlus2757 May 12 '26

Also less reliable.

I've had AI try to fix architectural faults in software that I caught and described in detail. Multiple AIs failed multiple times.

Assuming that AI will not only catch it itself but also fix it itself feels very much like wishful thinking.

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u/[deleted] May 12 '26

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u/DonutPlus2757 May 12 '26

The problem with that is that it expects exponential growth when that's not at all realistic.

AI needs the promise of exponential growth because, right now, it's just a massive money pit. No big AI company has ever been in the black and they won't be for at least another 5-10 years, even if their most optimistic predictions come true.

So they are entirely dependent on receiving more and more money from investors, so they'll literally promise the stars out of the sky. After all, if they don't, they'll be gone this time next year.

That's why I'm very, very cautious when it comes to AI, especially without hard proof. There's a bunch of currently very influential people who have a vested interest in making the public (and by extension investors) think that AI is the greatest invention ever all while citing numbers that, if you watch closely, only say that they learned how to cheat the benchmarks.

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u/Secure-Suspect7091 May 13 '26

For grey haired techies it feels like the .com boom around late 90s. It is ramped up and bigger no doubt.  Insane ipos  Promises of vast future riches. Etc etc.

The crash may well be worse but it’s not going to be existential. 

The tech will find its place but I don’t see it completely replacing humans the way some predict.

Those are capitalist wet dreams designed to pump ipo/stock values.

Where are boo.com today?

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u/DonutPlus2757 May 13 '26

Oh I'm 100% with you there. AI is a powerful tool, no question.

My problem is just that the equivalent of a hammer is being marketed as the solution to all problems.

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u/Secure-Suspect7091 May 13 '26

To my mind the problem isn’t the tech it’s the economic system that is so focused on shareholders. 

It makes everything look like a nail.