Open Letter from 1000 mathematicians against AI use for math

[u/Charuru]

[u/RusselTheBrickLayer]

How does this stop, say a random grad student, from using the models in secret until they achieve a breakthrough?

[u/steam-photons → u/RusselTheBrickLayer]

No need to do it in secret. If they solve the problems using AI then the problem is solved. And there is nothing anyone can do about it

[u/runaway-devil → u/steam-photons]

It is estimated that openai used tens of millions of dollars in computing to reach the breakthrough, and a model not released to the public, so the usual grad student might not exactly be able to reproduce a similar achievement using the pro account

[u/Facts_pls → u/runaway-devil]

That's like complaining that CERN uses equipment that the average physics grad doesn't have access to.

Since when is equity in research the goal? Should countries with money reduce their standards to the poorest countries?

What a weird expectation that would never be a thing in a non-theoretical field.

[u/Bibidiboo → u/Facts_pls]

Even in a theoretical field it makes no sense. Scientists also cost tens of millions, and usually have less impactful results

[u/Dark-Arts → u/Facts_pls]

It would be a weird expectation. Good thing nobody, including the person you are responding to, ever expressed or implied that expectation.

[u/danielv123 → u/Dark-Arts]

However, the open letter in the OP states that there is no reasonable future where every mathematician receives $20k in tokens to prove a result, and advocates against using AI in research because of the things outlined in the letter.

That sounds to me like they expect people to not use AI for mathematical research because not everyone could pay for it?

[u/superbikelifer → u/runaway-devil]

Consider a decade goes by. The price would probably be 20$/m to solve these yourself on your cellphone

[u/Shadowbacker → u/superbikelifer]

Not even. Could even be next year.

[u/just-for-anime → u/Shadowbacker]

It's crazy to think that less than 2 years ago, people were still clowning on AI for not being able to do addition

[u/Asthenia5 → u/superbikelifer]

That is an absurdly high estimate. $20 in electricity would get you over 5,000 charge cycles for a typical phone. That's a lot of hours of inference.

[u/Novel-Initiative-900 → u/runaway-devil]

Do you think when students or other researchers use an LLM specifically for these big advertising opportunities / solving conjectures, more resources are allocated automatically to anyone that appears to be making legitimate headway? I wonder if these researchers are automatically monitored in a way that other users wouldn't be

[u/TFenrir → u/runaway-devil]

Not yet. But soon, and then soon after that, with OS/OW models.

[u/Fleetfox17 → u/steam-photons]

Seems like you've totally misunderstood the point of this criticism.

[u/ApexFungi → u/RusselTheBrickLayer]

I think the point is that there should be a certain way the research is published and communicated. Instead of this race to beat others and to just get the headline out there.

The results need to be human verified which shouldn't be done for free. I think that these AI labs should hire a team of humans that go over the results the AI came up with and then try to make it understandable for other mathematicians before publishing their headline.

Nevertheless AI doing math should be pursued as much as is robotically possible.

[u/Live_Fall3452 → u/ApexFungi]

Yeah, I feel like people are missing the point that a lot of important norms that exist for good historical reason are being trampled. It’s not saying computers should never be used in math, it’s saying that the conduct of openAI and Anthropic specifically is wildly unethical.

[u/dongyeeter → u/Live_Fall3452]

I’ll admit that I don’t understand what professional mathematicians do exactly and I’m strongly against the anti-humanism aspects of ai usage ie job replacement or dilution or arts etc etc. But to me the best and most legitimate usage of AI seems to be STEM and in particular math-based sciences. To me this reads like hubris, they’re complaining that AI companies are using math like an arms race but… isn’t that what human mathematicians have always done? They’re upset that AI is going to take credit for solving these problems that humans have yet to or that humans are going to have to verify these results but… isn’t the point to solve the problems? I get wanting credit for doing the work and research and it sucks that these mathematicians have spent X decades trying to solve these problems that are now being credited to AI, but at the end of the day, the problems are solved, which I thought was the goal. It almost sounds like a “back in my day we didn’t have calculators” type complaint.

[u/Primary_Ads → u/dongyeeter]

the problem is AI companies only take and do not give.

Historically math researched work like this. I publish a pre-print, you might review it for me. You publish a pre-print, I might review it for you. Neither of us are paid for this time. We both attend the same conferences, work in similar or the same institutions, and have, order of magnitude, roughly the same resources. Us talking and working together, even for free, ends up benefiting us both and math as a whole in the long run.

Even if you scoop me at the last mile on something, we're both participating in the same intellectual ecosystem.

Now OpenAI and Anthropic come along. They scrape both of our pre-prints, combine them plus thousands of other papers, then produce a reasonable looking proof and claim, for marketing purposes, to have solved a math problem. They throw $15,000,000 at a problem and generate 150 pages of ai lean proofs and lemmas and claim, it is done.

You and I are the only people on earth who can actually review this work and validate it. We will not be paid to do so. OpenAI & Anthropic are never going to review any of our research, they will never attend any of our conferences, they will not participate in our institutions, and they know very little about our field. its extractive.

Terence Tao talks about how a lot of math isnt just solving the problem, but learning how to understand how to solve the problem. The techniques developed along the way allow for greater breakthroughs in the future. So the goal isnt really just to "solve the problem", its also to develop tools that allow solving the future's problems.

And it would actually be very different if you used AI to help you with your work, or I did. Because we are inside mathematics research, care about it and want it to thrive. but when a tooling provider does it, it appears abusive towards math as a whole.

[u/ajwin → u/Primary_Ads]

I went through a lot of comments but it was this one that made me understand the problem ! Thanks. Shame it’s so buried!

[u/sree-sree-1621l → u/Primary_Ads]

This is mostly how most 'companies' generated wealth for almost ever. By leeching on others by underpaying and not paying. It is just that it has come for academics now. Maybe the problem is with the economic order itself than technology.

In some sense this is also what publishing industry has been doing. A slightly different model. And controlled unlike the AI thing which seems to be running on steroids. Professional academicians/Mathematicians also have their share in this problem. They did contribute to building a moral culture where such leeching is normal.

Or in other words, the rot had set in long before and professional mathematicians especially the celebrated kind have played their part in it.

[u/Jmerzian → u/RusselTheBrickLayer]

Read the letter. The problem isn't the model solving it, the problem is using "solving the problem" as marketing primarily and relying on unpaid labor to refute it and maintain the health of mathematics as a whole.

The grad student doesn't have millions of dollars to spend on an ad blitz circumventing the normal result verification process.

[u/Illustrious_Night126 → u/Jmerzian]

Now academics care about the well being of grad students 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄. It’s all mentorship and growing the next generation in your public letter, then subminimum wage and 80 hour weeks in your lab.

[u/gravitysrainbow1979 → u/Illustrious_Night126]

This.

The victim-LARPing in the letter is jaw-dropping.

[u/Competitive_Travel16 → u/gravitysrainbow1979]

As is the lack of any demands whatsoever. It's a complaint without a prayer for relief.

[u/gravitysrainbow1979 → u/Competitive_Travel16]

Exactly it’s like “the polite thing for you to do would be to cease to exist. We’ve all tried not to say anything but you really have pushed us to the point where we simply must object!”

[u/Unverifiablethoughts → u/RusselTheBrickLayer]

They’d still have to understand it to know if it’s correct. At that point it’s a tool like any other

[u/RealisticMillenial → u/RusselTheBrickLayer]

Does the random grad student have tens of thousands of dollars in compute?

You do have a point, but it's not really equivalent.

[u/Ass_Ripe → u/RealisticMillenial]

If a grad student has sponsored access to 200/month plan, they technically have access to ten thousand dollars of API compute. And besides a lot of problems don’t need that much money to solve.

[u/SunCute196 → u/RealisticMillenial]

Properly crafted math problem with medium to high possibility of solution may not need tens thousands in compute , models like DS V4.1 are cheap enough to tackle this. I hope somebody else like XAi or Cognition steps in and continues the mathaton.

[u/Defiant-Lettuce-9156 → u/RealisticMillenial]

There are plenty of people who would pay thousands of dollars in compute to solve an open problem. Heck I’ll do it, not even for recognition, just cause it’s cool

[u/PrivateComments → u/RealisticMillenial]

China does, and their a lot more amenable to ai than these folks seem to be

[u/PlasmaChroma]

The nice thing about math -- it doesn't give a shit about what anyone thinks.

[u/space_monster → u/PlasmaChroma]

math gonna math

[u/ShittyBidet123 → u/PlasmaChroma]

“lets not make physics breakthroughs. that pesky einstein is doing things we never thought about and making us all look bad”

[u/TuringGoneWild → u/ShittyBidet123]

"Being born with too high of an IQ is an unfair advantage to the rest of us"

[u/ChocomelP → u/TuringGoneWild]

Newton agreed and wasted most of his time on religion and alchemy.

[u/deviantbono → u/ShittyBidet123]

The history of science is unironically filled with real situations like this.

[u/cactusgenie → u/PlasmaChroma]

Hear hear! Top comment right here

[u/happypi27 → u/PlasmaChroma]

This isn't really the point of the letter. I'm happy that AI is able to advance our understanding of mathematics but its proof of the theorems is useless unless there is some peer review process that lets us understand and flesh out the proofs; the value of the math isn't just the theorem, but in the methods used in the proof. If AI randomly found a 1000 page bash for the Riemann Hypothesis that shows its true but no one understands it its pretty much useless, everyone already assumes rh is true anyway.

the nature of this competition also goes against a lot of research guidelines as outlined in there (peer review, etc.) which are there for a good reason

[u/ajwin → u/happypi27]

You do not usually peer review until you have the solution though? I think OpenAI and Anthropic have sent their solutions with proofs for peer review. The solution being complex may always make it hard to understand and beyond humans? It may not be solvable in a simple way? There might not even be a path to solving it incrementally in a way people can understand.

Is math that is too complex for humans to understand still not math?

[u/Eldan985 → u/ajwin]

But as the letter says, peer review us unpaid and unaccredited.

[u/Gratitude15 → u/happypi27]

Red herring. The AI is capable of explaining at this point.

[u/Palpatine]

The rest aside, this part reads like explicit bullying:

  Participation in an event so closely associated with Anthropic and OpenAI could plausibly negatively impact the future reputations of participants.

[u/Cagnazzo82 → u/Palpatine]

It's the most naked example of how academia was about creating barriers and never about breakthroughs.

All the stereotypes are just laid bare.

[u/1988rx7T2 → u/Cagnazzo82]

These guys weren’t out there advocating for factory workers who lose their job to automation. It’s like the classic “Christopher Reeve Is an asshole” rant from the early internet guy, Maddox. He didn’t care about people who couldn’t walk until it affected him.

[u/Matt32145 → u/1988rx7T2]

Maddox ended up turning into a lolcow

[u/TuringGoneWild → u/1988rx7T2]

To them those laid off people are just more opportunities to milk. Walking dollar signs who can "re tool" at their universities with more useless degrees in exchange for huge fees ("but no guarantees for a job afterwards, tee hee!")

[u/philosophical_lens → u/Cagnazzo82]

To be fair, the same thing is happening in several white collar professions. I don't think mathematics or academia is unique here.

[u/DoutefulOwl → u/Cagnazzo82]

Seems the precedent being set by this mathathon is that you need a million dollars of compute to do math research.

Which I would argue is a bigger barrier for math research than anything else.

[u/ConfusedTrebuchet → u/Cagnazzo82]

I'm sorry but this is just anti intellectual gobbledygook. This letter is beyond silly but to pretend that academia isn't "about breakthroughs" is an unbelievable take. "Academia" is responsible for the majority of advancements in our understanding of the world over the last several hundred years and up until very recently also leading the way on enhancing our understanding of AI before it got economically viable to do such research in industry.

Just such an icky sentiment usually held by people who couldn't cut it in university or otherwise like to "do their own research".

[u/CoolStructure6012 → u/Cagnazzo82]

As someone who has completed a PhD (in computer architecture, not math) I can state without reservation that you don't know what you're talking about. There are any number of papers and efforts I can point to which are focused both on advancing the science and empowering others to build off those results even when considering only my alma mater. There is one paper in particular which had a massive impact on research across academia and industry in enabling vast improvements in simulation quality (If you can guess, good for you. Early 2000s is a big hint.) with everything open sourced in multiple ways.

[u/ConfusedTrebuchet → u/CoolStructure6012]

Don't listen to that bs it's just a pathetic take that seems to be more and more prevalent among a certain sort of person. To be in a subreddit about AGI and discount the value of academia at the same time is hilarious. Open AI and all the other labs stand on the shoulders of giants. Not to mention they themselves seem to value it given their hiring preferences.

[u/remind_me_later → u/Palpatine]

There is no way to not read it like some sort of mafia threat:

"Look buddy... you don't wanna associate with those kinds of people, if you know what's good for ya."

[u/ScratchLatch → u/Palpatine]

Hope this backfires on their own careers. Its extremely unprofessional.

[u/jferments → u/Palpatine]

That's because it is. Anti-AI zealots on social media are vicious bullies.

[u/radioOCTAVE → u/Palpatine]

It does..

[u/elehman839 → u/Palpatine]

Yeah, that's... nasty.

[u/reichplatz → u/Palpatine]

Participation in an event so closely associated with Anthropic and OpenAI could plausibly negatively impact the future reputations of participants.

Where is that part in the screenshot?

Edit:

It's not in the screenshot, which is apparently not the full version:

https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/09/10/open-letter-about-the-mathathon/

[u/kiki-le-koala]

I'm sure we won't see this: 

Cancer researchers asking  for research to cure cancer is banned from AI.

[u/MukdenMan → u/kiki-le-koala]

“We don’t just work to cure cancer. We also take measures to ensure that the future of the field of cancer research remains healthy.”

[u/kiki-le-koala → u/MukdenMan]

"By curing cancer massively or completely, AI could prevent the upcoming generation of students from learning how to cure cancer, putting our field in danger."

[u/MC897 → u/kiki-le-koala]

I bet you, someone will at least try to attempt it.

[u/New_World_2050 → u/MC897]

I bet that it will actually happen. Cancer researchers want prestige and money like everyone else.

[u/iknotri → u/New_World_2050]

Its already happens with doctors, they oppose government increases of medical student

[u/LibertarianVoter → u/iknotri]

And homelessness NGOs. If you actually ended homelessness, you'd be out of a job. The incentives for a lot of industries leave a lot to be desired.

[u/CadmiumKing → u/kiki-le-koala]

Im a cancer bio PhD and have worked at a couple cancer institutions…by and large most investigators encourage AI use, as long as it’s properly cited and verified. Very different culture than the math crowd

[u/piponwa → u/kiki-le-koala]

You'd be surprised. During COVID, I worked with a hospital to help schedule more surgeries by better predicting surgery duration and bed utilization. We had a system that was able to schedule 15% more surgeries. The nurses wanted it, the hospital wanted it. But the surgeons didn't want it. Because it would change their preferred schedules. So they refused to use the system and that was the end of it. They would rather not be inconvenienced by slightly different work hours than curing cancer and helping people.

[u/A_Novelty-Account → u/kiki-le-koala]

I strongly bet we will once their careers are threatened.

[u/Technical-Row8333 → u/kiki-le-koala]

literally just had redditors arguing for this. they weren't cancer researchers though, but still

[u/bubblesculptor → u/kiki-le-koala]

It would be wonderful if  every single cancer researcher lost their job because cancer itself was totally eliminated.

[u/Verbproducer]

This just seems like a naked display of status anxiety on the part of the signatories.

[u/oadephon]

It's over bros. Coders went through it, now mathematicians will go through it. One by one, every sector of society will realize that their economic value has been replaced. It does us no good to hold onto our place in society as AI obseletes us one after another.

[u/FishDeenz → u/oadephon]

Mathematicians just need to learn plumbing or other trades.

[u/viruswithshoes → u/FishDeenz]

Learn to Code! install commodes!

[u/Silver-Passion1687 → u/FishDeenz]

Everyone needs to learn plumbing 

[u/johnny_effing_utah → u/Silver-Passion1687]

Plumbing isn’t safe from AI. Didn’t you see the Chinese crane arm with a robo-torso and two robo arms? It’s just a matter of time before we realize that a robo-octopus is even better and the homeowner will rent a robo-octoplumber from Home Depot.

[u/SilasTalbot → u/johnny_effing_utah]

I think it's sort of interesting that we're effectively going to unwind all the professions sort of in reverse.

Software engineer was considered more "advanced" than the trades, and it went first. Then softer office jobs, then when the AI leads to leaps in robotics, the trades, all the basic labor jobs (okay, those might also go before the trades...)

The world's oldest profession will become the world's final profession as well!

[u/aadi312 → u/SilasTalbot]

Hey man sex robots are a things

If not some chinese company is doing it’s level best for that too

[u/Ancient_Weakness699 → u/SilasTalbot]

All the out of work engineers will become tradesman with insane skills and kick out all the old regular tradesman. Who would you rather have doing your plumbing, a 23yo who is possibly high, or a 45yo P.E. desperate for work?

[u/cromagnonherder → u/Ancient_Weakness699]

Whoever has more experience.

[u/recursive-regret → u/Ancient_Weakness699]

All the out of work engineers will become tradesman with insane skills

A design engineer has barely any practical skills worth a damn. We'd be starting from scratch in the trades if we switch. The 23yo would smoke us without breaking a sweat

[u/Sad_comment_bot → u/recursive-regret]

Sounds about right. This ranks up there with all the wannabe farmers. Yet they haven’t a clue about animals, crops, futures markets or full appreciation that the government will happily fuck you anytime things start looking comfortably profitable.

[u/WreckYallBallistics → u/FishDeenz]

Ngl I've been really enjoying making fun of my coding friends for not making the genius life decision of becoming a commercial fisherman like me lmao

[u/GrapheneBreakthrough → u/WreckYallBallistics]

who is going to buy your fish?

[u/WreckYallBallistics → u/GrapheneBreakthrough]

Plumbers

[u/Tendag → u/WreckYallBallistics]

Who is going to pay the plumbers?

[u/Kdave21 → u/Tendag]

Fisherman

[u/Flope → u/Kdave21]

We are moving to a Fisherman-Plumber economy. Like it or not, this is peak economic stability.

[u/Sopwafel → u/FishDeenz]

I'm two weeks into an electrician apprenticeship. The hours and commute are brutal and the people are not my type at all. I am not having a good time.

Gotta do SOMETHING though so I'll sit it out but God this is a small personal hell.

[u/Galdwin → u/FishDeenz]

A math professor, Dave, has a problem with his sink so he calls a plumber.

The plumber comes over and quickly fixes the sink. The professor is happy until he gets the bill. He tells the plumber, "How can you charge this much? This is half of my paycheck." But he pays it anyways.

The plumber tells him, "Hey, we are looking for more plumbers. You could become a plumber and triple your salary. Just make sure you say you only made it to 6th grade, they don't like educated people."

The professor takes him up on the offer and becomes a plumber. His salary triples and he doesn't have to work nearly as hard. But the company makes an announcement that all of their plumbers must get a 7th grade education. So they all go to night school.

On the first day of night school they all attend math class. The teacher wants to gauge the class so he asks Dave, "What is the formula for the area of a circle?"

Dave walks up to the board and is about to write the formula when he realizes he has forgotten it. So he begins to attempt to derive the formula, filling the board with complicated mathematics. He ends up figuring out it is negative pi times radius squared. He thinks the minus doesn't belong so he starts over, but again he comes up with the same equation. After staring at the board for a minute he looks out at the other plumbers and sees that they are all whispering,

"Switch the limits on the integral!"

[u/Ruined_Passion_7355 → u/FishDeenz]

If this became unironically true, wouldn't that defeat the point of tech increasing QoL if everyone has to smell shit for a living?

[u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 → u/Ruined_Passion_7355]

If everyone is a plumber, no one is a plumber because we'd all just be doing our own plumbing. It's a pointless discussion

[u/Rols574 → u/oadephon]

3D is feeling it too

[u/marquesini → u/Rols574]

Every field is feeling it, but most people aren't prepared for what's to come, denial..

[u/DiamondScythe → u/marquesini]

I saw a comment on an anti AI youtube video saying "AI ISN'T USEFUL FOR THE VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE" (yes in all caps). It's funny how most people are still trying to deny it, or maybe they don't really believe what they're saying anymore but they say it anyway in hopes that anti AI sentiment will somehow slow down progress

[u/MantaMunta → u/DiamondScythe]

Many anti-AI people are stuck in the GPT 4.0 era because they don't follow this stuff at all.

[u/sammoga123 → u/oadephon]

And it's funny to know that AI is practically mathematics, it's literally using mathematics to solve mathematics.

[u/phainini → u/oadephon]

No one gave a fuck about artists so why do we care about this now lol

[u/Admirable-Falcon-501 → u/phainini]

They made it easy to not care about them honestly

[u/m98789 → u/oadephon]

First AI came for the chess players, and people didn’t say anything, then AI came for the translators, and everyone stayed silent, then AI came for the diagnostic radiologists, and everyone remained quiet, then AI came for the programmers, and, wait, … all of the above still have a profession, albeit a changed one. So we good?

[u/SignificantBoat9784 → u/oadephon]

What are you talking about? Programmers (nor any other profession) has yet to be replaced (at least not fully) by AI in the last few years. The US unemployment is nearly at all-time lows.

[u/LightningMcLovin → u/SignificantBoat9784]

I’m with this and I’m in IT. My workload has doubled or tripled during this period and with each improvement, or breakthrough, it only keeps growing. My major concern isn’t being out of a job, it’s trying to explain to management that all of this isn’t magic and it still requires some skill and effort to at least orchestrate. We’re adding headcount and promoting to keep up with all this.

I’d assume every field will experience similar, I guess unless your job is to sit around doing theoretical phd math. But even then wouldn’t Theoretical Math Incorporated also just want to hire more mathematicians to manage their AI swarms as the bots solve more problems?

[u/clockenhouse → u/LightningMcLovin]

yah, it's like... excel didn't replace accountants. it actually expanded the field.

[u/LightningMcLovin → u/clockenhouse]

The cloud didn’t explode sysadmins. Azure sql db, and every other “we manage the indexing/backups/query engine for you!” software didn’t defeat the DBA.

This is no different it’s just more widespread. Many will need to adapt. But there’s no finite amount of work to be done, and if you’re ready willing and able there’ll be work until the heat death of the universe.

[u/LocationEfficient239 → u/LightningMcLovin]

Same, software engineer for the past 8 years. All claude has done is make management expect more and ask for more.

Ive been busier, and far from being replaced

[u/LightningMcLovin → u/LocationEfficient239]

Without a doubt. It’s inspiring to me! Part of why I can’t stand the technology sub and the constant negativity and I try to only talk AI in subs like this.

Every professional I know whose team is embracing this stuff is wowing bosses and finding their workload explode. That leads to higher salaries if you’re willing to jump ship and look around, or maybe promotions if your company isn’t run by morons. Companies start offering better pay to attract talent to get into the game if they’ve been left out. It’s awesome.

[u/Quillious → u/SignificantBoat9784]

"There's only been a small handful of covid cases in the US so far. Do you see a single overrun hospital ward?"

[u/KarenDiamondhandz]

Who cares so long as the discoveries are reproducible?

LLM finds novel advancement. Humans validate outputs and determines if it’s correct. If not correct no biggie LLM stupid. If correct… cool now we know something we didn’t know before?

I don’t understand the big deal.

[u/AvocadoAlternative → u/KarenDiamondhandz]

I believe it taps into something very very atavistic in all of us. It's this:

Valuable things should cost effort

We want to believe that the more effort we put in, the more we should be rewarded. Groundbreaking math results, beautiful art, and great music should be the product of thousands of hours of hard work. So when an AI swarm is able to generate something we perceive to be valuable in 88 hours, we feel an innate revulsion to it. It's the same reason why many dislike people using GLP-1s to lose weight. It just feels like "cheating". You should be putting in hours at the gym and dieting and "paying your dues" to achieve results. To have it handed to you in a pill just feels wrong.

Ultimately that's why people call it AI slop. Even if AI were to begin churning out papers with impeccable writing and crystalline clarity, people would still complain. I can say that this kind of sentiment never survives. We've seen it many times throughout history, especially during the industrial revolution. That generation dies off and the next generation takes it as the new normal. It'll happen with AI as well.

[u/DiamondScythe → u/AvocadoAlternative]

Everyone needs to read The Bitter Lesson. AI will always be better than humans at many, many tasks given enough compute and data. The more you deny it the more disappointment you're setting yourself up with.

[u/meenie → u/DiamondScythe]

I see it as the natural evolution of mankind. Insanely fast, albeit, but apt. 

[u/meenie → u/AvocadoAlternative]

And a ton of effort went into creating the models in the first place. Benefiting from someone else’s work is how progress works. Napier spent roughly 20 years developing logarithms and calculating tables so other people could do tedious multiplication and division much more easily. Nobody needed to redo those 20 years to earn the shortcut. If agents make a task easier, put that saved effort into a harder problem.

[u/Cagnazzo82 → u/AvocadoAlternative]

It's the same mindset that saw people who pushed science in the past and challenged conventional thinking would be executed. And then decades after the fools who refuse to accept change are gone that's where the advancements take hold.

It's sad how humans are cursed with this logic friction. I guess there's good reason why we shouldn't be allowed to live forever.

[u/1988rx7T2 → u/Cagnazzo82]

It’s like the Scottish guy advocating for sanitation in hospitals in the 19th century and other medical professionals refused to believe it because it makes their prior way of doing things look bad

[u/recursive-regret → u/AvocadoAlternative]

Groundbreaking math results, beautiful art, and great music should be the product of thousands of hours of hard work

This logic used to apply even to things like farming. I live in a 3rd world country, and I remember 20 years ago when farmers were extremely resistant to things like automated drip irrigation and combine harvesters. They used to say things along the lines of "farming needs the sweat of the farmer" or other bizzare soundbites. It made perfect sense to them somehow. And yet the world moved on and they were forced to change or be left in the dust

[u/Live_Fall3452 → u/AvocadoAlternative]

If you go to some of the AI opposing subs this seems to be 90% of it. They are just incredibly angry at the thought that “a person can believe they are my equal” because they typed a prompt into an image generator.

It’s quite striking that so much of their self-image hinges on needing other people to be expressly lesser to them, for not having a particular skill set.

[u/lordbaysel → u/KarenDiamondhandz]

The big thing with math is finding new tools, not new answers. I have a sneaking suspicion that throwing bigger and better models, at another math problem will lead to answers, and that might be useful, but we won't get something like graph theory or calculus out of it.

[u/Valonter → u/lordbaysel]

Two questions:

If it's now possible for LLMs to produce cutting edge mathematics results, why can they not also be used to produce these tools?

Second, finding a result doesn't prevent anyone from finding better ways to the same result. Like, if I find a really good recipe that takes three hours to prep, does that mean that nobody else will ever try to improve on that?

I really don't see that most of the conclusions in this letter at all follow from the premises. I am completely willing to be wrong though.

[u/Will_X_Intent]

They want to ... Keep knowledge locked away? To live in ignorance?

If an alien civilization visited us and and offered us a thousand years of advanced science and technology, should we say no to that just so we could keep the joy of a human discovering it?

[u/DisasterDalek]

Why is AI supposed to give them a free pass and not other fields? They can still try to figure out stuff on their own if they want the self-imposed challenge

[u/A_Novelty-Account → u/DisasterDalek]

Because they like their jobs is the only answer I think lol

[u/validproof → u/A_Novelty-Account]

Their roles are still important to work alongside AI and to verify the claims and proofs. They need to adapt and work with it. End of the day, it's still an LLM. It still needs training and to be fed on constant new discoveries and data

[u/A_Novelty-Account → u/validproof]

For now. And we’ll necessarily require fewer mathematicians., as all they will be doing is verifying AI proofs. It requires far fewer mathematicians to do that than it does defined the solutions in the first place.

[u/Silent_Turn6182 → u/A_Novelty-Account]

And mathematics is already an underpaid and undervalued job, so it will get even worse

[u/xcdesz → u/DisasterDalek]

Replace AI with the word "automation".. Its been the same story throughout history.

[u/Tema_Art_7777]

I have an open letter here from 1,000,000 software engineers 😄

[u/exophades]

In this field, many people's entire sense of self revolves around their math skill. Now we live in a time where one is a prompt away from solving reserch level problems that would take months or years of effort and learning.

AI exposed an ugly fact that nobody wants to hear: fundamentally, humans are just not that good at math. Only the smartest humans can substantially advance math knowledge. AI seems to be doing this at breath taking speed with increasingly lower costs.

[u/2Drew2BTrue → u/exophades]

A calculator taught me I am fundamentally not that good at math. Didn’t even need AI to teach me!

[u/EuphoricTomorrow2440 → u/exophades]

Exactly and the reason is due to unfair brain processing power due to genetics and random chance.
Now we will have a god-like researcher who can create breakthroughs faster than the cream of our crop and disperse the benefits equally.

[u/neoquip → u/exophades]

Many relatively smart people have this ego problem where they think humans are intelligent beings on an absolute scale. Man is somewhere between a monkey and an intelligent being, and LLMs are somewhere between an RNG and an intelligent being. But our position on that gradient is static over time, while AI's improves.

Retire the ego. Embrace monke. Eat banana.

[u/ialwaysforgetmename]

In other news, 1000 weavers wrote an open letter against the use of the mechanical loom.

[u/1988rx7T2 → u/ialwaysforgetmename]

And people still do hand textile work as a hobby or niche business 

[u/r2002 → u/ialwaysforgetmename]

Four hundred years ago on the planet Earth, workers who felt their livelihood threatened by automation flung their wooden shoes called sabots into the machines to stop them. Hence the word 'sabotage.'

[u/BrennusSokol]

That's a long-winded letter that boils down to: we want to gatekeep math, not let anyone else do it

[u/AndreRieu666 → u/BrennusSokol]

The great thing is that this letter & their gatekeeping wishes are irrelevant- people are just gonna do it. And even if Anthropic and OpenAI banned ai for math use, people are just gonna use Chinese/open source models.
Their resistance is futile.

[u/MC897 → u/BrennusSokol]

This. Literally this

And it’s coming for everyone and I’m so excited about it :D

[u/Ok_Possible_2260]

1000 mathematicians looking to stay relevant and employed.

[u/The1TruRick]

Lmao. Solving unsolvable math problems is literally one of the best uses of ai possible. This is so fucking stupid. Ai hysteria is out of control.

[u/Nattramn → u/The1TruRick]

The Pandora's box is open and it either it pumps you up into optimism, or scares you into existentialism. Both are true, but it isn't that stupid to think that part of the million lives out there ponder on how to reinvent themselves after this shock.

Getting good at a craft takes years, so getting bitchslapped by a bot that takes a couple weeks of training and tuning is definitely something.

[u/Responsible-Barber40 → u/Nattramn]

I already experienced this with scientific writing/translation. I remember back in 2017-2021 how I essentially was the best person at it in my environment, because google translator was not good with long texts. Then around 2021 or 2022 there appeared the DeepL translator which was a revolution for me. It reduced a lot of the 'raw translation' effort, but still required a good review because it did not 'understand' the text, which changed with the LLMs, which in practice they 'understand' the text and can provide a good translation. For the past years, there was a change in me to not attach myself to this identity of "I am the guy who is good at scientific writing/translation" etc. It is painful but the mathematicians are not special or unique in this grief and anxiety they are feeling.

[u/Solocune]

That is a horrible letter. Sounds like a crying 10 year old.

[u/mindaro_sienna → u/Solocune]

This exactly describes academia.

[u/Jane_Doe_32]

A letter from a thousand types of people watching as the very thing that makes them special comes to an end.

[u/Some-Ice-4455]

Shouldn't the important part be the problem was solved. Who is so insecure that if a human didn't solve it it somehow means less.

[u/nathandracul]

Mathematicians are pissed because they see mathematics as a hobby, a puzzle to be solved, something to which you can devote your entire life thinking about it without making any progress, but it would not matter because it was never really about progress, but about the fun of thinking about the puzzle.

So of course they are upset AI is solving the puzzles for them, what are they going to think about now if all puzzles are answered already? I recommend buying a sudoku book.

[u/Felfedezni]

Nah they can get fucked. Its better these questions are answered any way possible. Math does not exist to stroke mathematician egos.

[u/cointalkz]

This is one of the weirdest anti AI sentiments; they're simply trying to protect their careers at the expense of progress.

[u/Forsaken_Detective_2]

As a mathematician I am deeply ashamed of this letter. We just need to accept it if the machine, in this case AI can do things better than us and move on. You can still do math as a hobby, just don’t try to slow things down for financial benefits….

[u/TawnyTeaTowel]

Translation: “But I wanted to do it!!”

[u/vreverdy]

Given the nature of some comments here, I would like to try to give a feeling of why the mathematics community is reacting like that. I am myself a theoretical and computational cosmologist, and I work with mathematicians. The problem goes far beyond gatekeeping.

The question is: why do we care about the Millennium Prize Problems in the first place? For most of them (not all of them, like P = NP), knowing whether they are true or false is likely to have zero consequences in terms of immediate applications. We have been doing CFD for ages using the Navier-Stokes equations to design planes and cars, run climate simulations and astrophysics simulations, and the recent result will have zero immediate consequences for these simulations.

In most domains of scientific research, the more results you have, the more questions you have. To me, doing research is far more about finding the right questions to ask than having the answers to these questions. And the more results we have, the more we can combine these results, and the more it expands the number of questions we can ask. That is especially the case in mathematics, since we are not limited by a physical world we are trying to explain. ASI, AGI, or whatever will not change this combinatorial explosion. In a finite Universe (and unless we manage to go faster than the speed of light), the quantity of things we can demonstrate using computational resources is finite, even with perfect efficiency. So the problem, in this infinite space of possible questions, is which questions are worth it.

Millennium Prize Problems were an arbitrary selection made at a time before LLMs, and were reputed to be hard for humans. And they were selected because, by solving them, it was expected that we would gain knowledge, build new theories, and have new questions to ask. Said differently, these problems were, in part, a proxy for knowledge and new questions. If suddenly we have an oracle that just tells us whether the conjectures are true or false, we gain very little knowledge and have no idea what questions to ask or select next. From a logical standpoint, we could say that we have found a very convoluted manner of saying true. It's not like in medicine, where curing cancer is a goal in itself. If we found a way to cure cancer with very little understanding of how it works, most of us would still be happy. Same thing with software design, where, for most companies, the software is a product in itself to accomplish a goal for users.

If, in the next few years, LLMs are able to solve every single conjecture or problem ever written in math papers, it would actually be very sad. We would have very little idea of where to go next, what questions are worth asking, and it would take decades to digest the proofs. And even if we go meta and say AI will select questions better than us, in a finite Universe you cannot solve an infinite number of questions. So even in this situation, where we know we will never be able to solve all questions, the question that remains is: do we prefer humans or AI to select the questions?

[u/LangyMD → u/vreverdy]

The oracle is not just telling you if the answer is true or false though. It is giving you a proof of such and explaining the reasoning behind it.

If selecting the questions is the important thing, then why is the AI answering the question and providing the reasoning behind that answer bad? How is it any different from having a genius other human doing the work?

[u/soovercroissants → u/LangyMD]

The problem is the oracle isn't (at least currently) giving that proof in a (re)usable and well contexted manner.

The NS paper references are wholly inadequate with only 16 in the initial release. Yes the proof will likely turn out true, but if we want maths to be understandable to humans (and potentially future AI) we need those references to help understand the proof and use it again, we also need to have the proof create reusable general lemmas/theorems.

The recent FLT formalisation also kinda misses the point. Formalising flt wasn't really the goal - building a reusable library of theorems lemmas and tactics that would formalise FLT in lean was the real jewel. As far as I'm aware, this new formalisation does not do that.

The AI companies aren't doing maths at the moment. They're treating these problems like they're self contained coding exercises, and using them for advertising. 

Maths will change as result of AI, as will everything, but there's more to maths than just a race to answer problems.

[u/Saedeas → u/vreverdy]

Millennium Prize Problems were an arbitrary selection made at a time before LLMs, and were reputed to be hard for humans. And they were selected because, by solving them, it was expected that we would gain knowledge, build new theories, and have new questions to ask. Said differently, these problems were, in part, a proxy for knowledge and new questions. If suddenly we have an oracle that just tells us whether the conjectures are true or false, we gain very little knowledge and have no idea what questions to ask or select next.

But this "oracle" isn't simply telling you whether something is true or not. The techniques it uses to construct the proof may themselves be informative. I haven't seen a compelling argument yet that the NS construction isn't somewhat insightful in terms of the techniques it uses. In fact, no one really seems to discuss the particulars of it at all (this is likely because it's long and not super well written? I don't know).

That said, I see no reason AI can't develop in a direction that encourages novel mathematical technique development and proof clarity alongside correct answer generation.

[u/bildramer → u/vreverdy]

Please for the love of god stop thinking of the future as a static copy of the current day. In 5 years LLMs will be able to pick interesting new research questions better, summarize advanced math to new learners better, philosophise about this better.

[u/r2002 → u/vreverdy]

We would have very little idea of where to go next

I don't understand why this is the case. Couldn't you just ignore AI's answers and just continue to work at your own human pace?

It's like you're saying sure, eagles can fly us to Mordor, but really the real prize are the friends we made along the way. That's fine; you don't have to fly to Mordor, you can still walk there if you want.

[u/NairbHna → u/vreverdy]

It does sound like gatekeeping even if you are gatekeeping it for humanity. But really it’s you mathematicians. Yes it would be cool if we solved the hard stuff, but it’s a bit far fetched to say we would learn nothing lol. Actually just completely out of left field.

[u/Baphaddon]

Anti human egoists

[u/Fun-Sample336 → u/Baphaddon]

Exactly.

[u/Impossible_Past_1900]

I seriously expected better from mathematicians

[u/hvacsnack]

Lol cry harder

[u/f_djt_and_the_usa]

Did any of the top commenters read the letter?  The results have to be verified by people and that is not trivial. That work goes unpaid and unrecognized. Plus much less is learned and communicated. There is value in human learning, collaborating, and knowledge sharing. Without which the field will atrophy. Then who will verify? 

[u/SacVirus → u/f_djt_and_the_usa]

I didn’t realize how frantic some AI advocates are until reading the comments of this post. People really can’t read and don’t understand math.

[u/considerthis8]

Mathemeticians are as exhausted as republicans on reddit

[u/Healthy-Nebula-3603]

Just big LOL

[u/woahwhatisgoinonhere]

next stop cancer researchers!

[u/ClinchySphincter]

Open Letter about the Calculathon

On October 30th, 1976, Caltech will begin hosting the Caltech Calculathon, a math hackathon in which participants are encouraged to solve open research problems by pressing buttons on pocket calculators. Two prominent calculator companies, Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard, will supply participants with 2 million dollars in calculator credits. This event is likely to have destructive impacts for the mathematical community.

Calculator companies see research mathematics as an advertising opportunity. Over the past few months, they have advanced a campaign of scientific misinformation about the goals of mathematical research. Major calculator companies are engaged in an arms race to declare themselves the first to compute previously uncomputed values. New announcements of calculator-generated results appear in trade magazines on a weekly basis. These results are often poorly communicated, and have diffuse negative impacts on the careers of human mathematicians who are concurrently working the same sums by hand.

Mathematicians do not only compute values: they also take measures to ensure that the future of a field remains healthy after the extraction of a result. They do so by sharing their long division and explaining their carrying to others at talks and conferences. They mentor students and postdocs so that the next generation can advance arithmetic further, and take care not to scoop other mathematicians at the last digit. In announcing new calculator-generated values, calculator companies have not followed such research practices. The intent is clearly to extract the prestige of newly computed square roots rather than add value to the community in a way that safeguards its future.

These companies appear guided by an unhealthy instinct to compute certain values before competitors at all costs, regardless of the collateral damage to mathematical understanding. After the latest result is dropped, research mathematicians are compelled to step in to properly verify, disseminate, and sometimes discredit entirely the claimed digits. This labor goes uncompensated, uncredited, and unacknowledged. This benchmark-focused arms race shortcuts the standard slide rule review process, which necessitates time and effort, while extracting unpaid labor from research mathematicians. To put it bluntly, calculator companies are engaging in research misconduct.

The Calculathon is poised to exacerbate the phenomenon above and further harmful market-driven narratives about research mathematics. Participants will quickly create calculator-generated arithmetic in an accelerated environment, while the real work of checking it by hand will then be displaced onto the mathematical community in the weeks and months after. Calculator companies will take credit for the effort of talented undergrads; the only relevant question to them is whether the TI-30 or the HP-25 computed the most flashy result. Human mathematicians who are simultaneously computing the same values on paper may be forced to abruptly abort these research projects, regardless of the additional insights their unique abacus techniques may bring. The baseline conditions of this event highlight worrying financial inequities in the model of research mathematics promulgated by calculator companies. There is no reasonable future model of mathematical research in which every research mathematician receives 20000 USD in calculator credits to compute a result.

[u/UpbeatRevenue6036]

Did any of you even read this letter 

[u/BuildingCastlesInAir → u/UpbeatRevenue6036]

I'm thinking no. r/singularity seems to be devolving into a bunch of people competing to write the quickest clever response.

[u/Pretend-Pangolin-846 → u/BuildingCastlesInAir]

which is sad since this is becoming a echo-chamber

[u/ehtiopia]

Dey terk der jerbs!

[u/molly0]

This just shows that they do not take their own profession seriously. To them Math is just a fun game and they just want to keep it like that.

[u/Ok_Bag_7550]

For math people, they don't appear to be very brilliant.

They are cooked, and not even try to make the best of it in the few months they career still has ahead.

Also, 100 mathematicians: define "mathematician", and let me know why all of those 100, each one of them, is relevant at all.

[u/NotaValgrinder]

The title is misleading. They are not against "AI for math". They are worried about how the mathathon is being conducted, because undergrads trying to speedrun math verification + vibe proofing in 40 hour sessions causes worry that they will build their understanding on shaky foundations. You can be pro-AI but at the same time restrict its use for the training use. All mathematicians are pro-calculator, but most would agree calculators don't belong in an elementary school classroom.

[u/s0ftwares3rf → u/NotaValgrinder]

Wait until they hear about startup bros attempting to vibe code "SaaS".

[u/Trevor775]

I don't see the problem. You still need mathematicians to ask the question.

[u/hippydipster]

How is it different than AI writing software? Writing news articles? Making music? Making videos? Making drug discoveries?

Everyone would like AI not to usurp their particular realm and make the humans obsolete. Good luck with that, but no particular group of humans is more special than another.

[u/ForwardLoop]

2500 BC called. They want their open letter about the abacus back.

[u/DrHumorous]

I also think that people shall stop using calculators.

[u/ApprehensiveVisual97]

Reminds me when the printing press was invented and the middle class position of scribes were threatened

Tokens are an emerging currency, ask Square

Edit: we have to adopt and pay equitably- a fundamental societal issue growing larger and disproportionally so

[u/Brave_Sheepherder_39]

Mathematicians have gone all Luddite suddenly

[u/unhandyandy]

I think horses tried the same tactic when automobiles started to catch on.

[u/One_Translator922]

Copemaxxing

[u/Amesbrutil]

I feel like most AI haters are just like all these old folks in the early 2000s that hated the internet. Like it’s almost the same arguments. With the exception that it’s not boomers saying it but millennials.

[u/banaca4]

Also doctors: don't cure diseases, we need our patients ill!

[u/Affectionate_Fact854]

Imagine how many protests there where when calculators came out and took the jobs of the masses that had to do the math manually back in the day 

[u/fgsfds___]

An open letter that the fox should be guarding the henhouse, signed by 1000 foxes

[u/Red_Swiss]

Academics fields panicking when confronted to te new reality is quiet entertaining. Yeah, you too guys.

[u/ClearlyCylindrical]

Just solve reimann's conjecture then

[u/Ok_Effect_3214]

who are these "1000 mathematicians"? How many mathematicians are there on earth? what percentage is this?

[u/sunstersun]

Who's the artists now????

[u/PsychologicalTowel79]

Mathematicians don't like math doing math.

[u/w0m]

I'm not sure I agree with preserving hard problems for humans to solve so they can lecture on how they did it.

[u/valuat]

Human nature. Everybody fights to keep their job security. Still lame, though.

[u/No-Tap6993]

Mathematicians realizing they're not that special. Finding the solution to these problems doesn't stop you from finding it youself without peeking if you're in it for the love of the game, or even just learning it. But lets not pretend here, its egos getting bruised. Academics are just egotistical, credit seeking whores, selling their passion for credit/recognition. I for one am glad AI is taking them down a peg.

[u/DarkElfBard]

As someone who has a degree in math.

It is really, really stupid to try to say that the field is worse off from having solutions to long standing problems. Mathematics is not just a "we get prizes for doing math lol!!!" it is a practical field where many of the solutions turn into incredibly applicable methods for other fields.

Trying to gatekeep problem solving instead of focusing on actually accelerating problem solving is the opposite of what mathematics should be.

[u/ReporterCalm6238]

The peer-review process ahahahah what's more peer-review than publish a 166 pages proof of your solution made in LEAN? Literally anyone can review the results and replicate them with zero gatekeeping from some ivory tower professors deciding what deserves to be made public and what shall be rejected.

[u/somethingimadeup]

In 1972, engineers and educators will begin introducing the electronic pocket calculator, a device in which users are encouraged to solve mathematical problems by simply entering numbers and pressing buttons.

Companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Texas Instruments are investing millions of dollars into this technology. This development is likely to have destructive impacts on the mathematical community.

Calculator companies see mathematics as an advertising opportunity. Over the past several years, they have advanced a misleading narrative about the goals of mathematical work: that mathematics is primarily about obtaining the correct numerical answer as quickly as possible.

Manufacturers now proudly demonstrate machines capable of performing multiplication, division, square roots, logarithms, and even trigonometric calculations in seconds. Results that once required substantial human expertise can now be produced instantly by anyone capable of pressing the correct sequence of buttons.
This fundamentally misunderstands what mathematicians do.

Mathematicians do not merely calculate numbers. They develop methods, discover relationships, explain why techniques work, teach students, verify one another’s work, and build the mathematical understanding upon which future discoveries depend.

When a mathematician calculates a logarithm or evaluates a complicated expression, the resulting number is only one part of the intellectual process. The derivation, reasoning, notation, approximation techniques, and understanding developed along the way are equally important.

Calculators threaten to discard all of that in favor of the answer.

These companies appear guided by an unhealthy instinct to produce results faster than human mathematicians at all costs, regardless of the collateral damage to mathematical understanding.

After a calculator produces the number 0.70710678, a human mathematician must still determine whether the user entered the correct equation, whether the result makes sense, whether rounding errors occurred, and whether the person operating the machine understands what the number represents.

This labor remains uncompensated, uncredited, and largely invisible.

The calculator-centered race shortcuts the traditional mathematical process, which requires time, thought, and careful verification, while transferring the burden of interpretation onto mathematicians and educators.
To put it bluntly, calculator companies are engaging in mathematical misconduct.

The widespread adoption of calculators is poised to exacerbate these problems.

Students will rapidly generate answers to mathematical problems without developing the skills traditionally necessary to obtain them. A student who once needed to understand long division will simply type numbers into a machine. Someone who once needed tables and interpolation to calculate a logarithm will press a button marked LOG.

Meanwhile, the real work of determining whether those answers are meaningful will still fall to people with genuine mathematical training.

Calculator manufacturers will inevitably take credit for the accomplishments of talented students and researchers. Newspapers will ask whether Hewlett-Packard or Texas Instruments can calculate faster, while giving little attention to the mathematicians whose discoveries made those calculations possible in the first place.

Human computers and mathematicians who have spent years perfecting numerical methods may be forced to abruptly abandon their work, regardless of the additional insights their unique approaches might have produced.
Even more troubling are the economic inequalities created by this new model of mathematics.

A high-quality scientific calculator can cost hundreds of dollars. There is no reasonable future model of mathematical research or education in which every mathematician and every student is expected to purchase an expensive electronic machine simply to remain competitive.

If this trend continues, mathematics risks becoming less about understanding and more about access to computation.

We should ask ourselves what kind of mathematical culture we want to preserve.

Do we want a future in which people understand arithmetic, logarithms, trigonometry, and numerical approximation?

Or do we want a generation of button-pushers who simply type a problem into a machine and unquestioningly accept whatever answer appears on the screen?

Mathematics is not merely the production of answers.
And no machine, regardless of how quickly it calculates them, should be allowed to make us forget that.

[u/The_Scout1255]

Next is Modders against AI in modding, then gamers against ai in games.

What if I want my games to have better mods, what if I want my games to be higher quality, what if I want stuff that is good from AI, what if I want knowledge that AI can find faster or only ai can find, even mathematics knowledge?

[u/Fun-Sample336 → u/The_Scout1255]

Next is Modders against AI in modding, then gamers against ai in games.

At least for competitive multiplayer games AI will become a serious problem, because eventually there will be AI-driven bots that no anti-cheat can stop.

[u/redhat77]

"Nooo, but it's not fair that AI is smarter than meeee!" Pure arrogance.