"Tuesday night, I cried and it woke up my daughter," confessed mathematician Hugo Duminil-Copin, the recipient of the 2022 Fields Medal, during a videoconference organized by the Société Mathématique de France on Thursday, October 8. The reason for his tears? The American artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI posted more than 719 manuscripts, grouped into 372 families, claiming to solve many open mathematical problems. No fewer than 16 of these questions were directly related to the French researcher's work.
"They have annihilated my field of research," he calmly explained. He shared a slide, generated by AI, that depicted a rabbit being crushed by several trucks. "They wanted to prove they could massacre us," he added, before referring in the question-and-answer session to "a dismantling of our activity."
The mathematics community has been living a nightmare for the past month. On September 8, OpenAI posted evidence that its programs had solved a problem with a million-dollar prize since 2000 (the Navier-Stokes problem). It was a shock. This was already the third such blow for Duminil-Copin, who had realized the potential of these AIs as early as April. Along with a colleague, he discovered that an AI developed by Anthropic, a competitor of OpenAI, was able to solve a difficult problem, providing elegant and concise proof.
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