Twenty-five Fields Medalists, including Terence Tao, Peter Scholze, and Maryna Viazovska, have signed a statement warning that the AI race to solve famous math problems is becoming harmful to mathematics. Recently, more than 700 mathematicians protested an AI “Mathathon” at Caltech, and OpenAI withdrew its $1 million sponsorship. This is turning into a much broader fight between mathematicians and AI labs over what mathematical research is supposed to be.
The interesting part is that most of the criticism is not really about if AI should be used in mathematics. It is about incentives. If the goal becomes beating everyone else to a famous theorem, grabbing headlines, and putting a dollar amount on the result, then mathematics starts looking less like a collaborative research community and more like a race. Given everything that has already happened around Navier Stokes, that concern does not seem completely unreasonable.
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