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Hot I.P.O Summer + What Is A.I. Doing to Math? + HatGPT
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Three Camps: How Mathematicians Feel About AI
At 41:10 · chapter starts 40:20
Hartnett offers a memorable vignette from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton — described as 'the citadel of modern math.' In one afternoon, he encountered two top-tier mathematicians with completely opposite views. The first had just closed Gemini in frustration after it told him something demonstrably false. The second, superficially similar on paper, predicted that AI would put mathematicians out of business within 2 years because it would soon be strictly better than humans at all of it. Terence Tao — the greatest living mathematician and most important figure in the debate — sits squarely in the middle [1] — Kevin Hartnett "At the Institute for Advanced Study, Kevin Hartnett met two top mathematicians in one afternoon with polar opposite views — one dismissed A…" 40:18 . Tao's view, which Kevin Roose describes from a recent OpenAI video, is that AI is like an 'Iron Man suit' or a 'jetpack for thoughts': it allows mathematicians to test many more ideas quickly, radically lowering cognitive friction for exploratory work. Hartnett suspects the dismissive camp was in the majority a year ago but is shrinking rapidly.
Over 800 mathematicians signed the Leiden Declaration expressing deep concern about irresponsible AI use in mathematics and potential erosion of the discipline.
Over 800 mathematicians signed the Leiden Declaration warning that AI is producing plausible but unreliable proofs, eroding human expertise, and steering mathematical priorities toward what AI is good at rather than what matters. Kevin Hartnett reads it as a field asserting: this is our discipline, and you don't get to tell us how it runs.
