The slew of mathematical proofs that AI has conjured in recent weeks has sent alarm bells ringing among the technical community.
Cosmologist Will Kinney kicked off the latest round of hand-wringing on X, and by the time Elon Musk weighed in with a single emoji, the post had racked up over 60,000 views.
Kinney, who describes himself on X as a cosmologist and physicist, posted: “Becoming increasingly convinced that AI is going to be an extinction-level event for math. It’s like watching the asteroid hit the dinosaurs.” The post pulled in 231 replies, 149 reposts and 1.5K likes, with over 151K impressions logged on the platform.
Sabine Hossenfelder, the German theoretical physicist and science YouTuber known for her blunt takes on the state of academia, quote-tweeted Kinney with a one-line addition: “and theoretical physics is next.”
Musk replied to the thread with just three characters: “💯”
There have been some remarkable breakthroughs in Math using AI, and they’ve only accelerated in recent weeks. Last year, AI models from OpenAI and Google had won gold medals at the International Math Olympiad. This was followed by models from a host of companies solving open Erdos problems. But this months, things have gone up a notch. An Anthropic researcher said that he’d managed to disprove the 85-year-old Jacobian conjecture during the World Cup final with help from Fable, and just yesterday, a researcher disproved the 30-year-old Dinitz-Garg-Goemans Conjecture using just 4 simple prompts. While math appears to be on shaky ground, theoretical physics could soon follow — like math, it is grounded in calculations and plenty of brute force, and it seems that there could be big breakthroughs in the space in the coming years. These are exciting times, but as the reactions from the scientific community have shown, are bringing with them anxieties of what their fields will be like in the not too distant future.