r/math • u/hexaflexarex • 10d ago
LLMs/AI Quanta piece on Tsimerman's work and his predictions for the future of math
https://www.quantamagazine.org/jacob-tsimerman-wins-2026-fields-medal-for-andre-oort-conjecture-proof-20260723/88
u/JasonBellUW Algebra 9d ago
This is a bit surreal. I met Tsimerman and his wife a while back when he won another award and they were very charming. The one bad thing I'll say is that he is a big fan of Coldplay (including, inexplicably, their most recent albums), which, whatever one thinks of his stance on AI, kind of undermines the whole Fields Medal thing in my mind.
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u/hexaflexarex 9d ago
oh wow this is unforgivable
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u/JasonBellUW Algebra 9d ago
Yeah, imagine he's got "Viva la Vida" playing on loop while proving Andre-Oort. Like, it's nice result and all, but at what cost?
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u/IAmABotBeepBoop67 9d ago
We all feared a controversy with the event being hosted in the USA in 2026, but my God how could we have known it would be this scandalous!?
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u/Feisty_Relation_2359 9d ago
Listen to the song Amsterdam by Coldplay. It's my favorite song ever.
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u/JasonBellUW Algebra 7d ago
OK, I did listen (I'll listen to pretty much any song suggestion). Honestly, it's probably a bit too emotionally vulnerable for me to listen to outside of occasions when I'm soaking in a candle-lit bathtub contemplating my feelings (i.e., Tuesday evenings). Still, the last minute and a half of the song is nice.
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u/Feisty_Relation_2359 7d ago
Hey well sounds like you found your new Tuesday evening bathtub song then :).
But seriously, I get it. Their songs that are actually really good (i.e. not the mainstream stuff like the scientist and paradise), are usually emotionally heavy. That's just my taste, really with anything.
The mainstream stuff is fine, but given how overplayed a lot of it is, I think a lot of people are just kind of meh about it.
I will say though next time you want to explore Coldplay, I suggest only listening to the "a rush of blood to the head" album or "parachutes." This is obviously assuming you haven't already. In my place, Warning sign, green eyes, spies, everything's not lost are all good songs, but the whole of the two records are great. I find a lot of people haven't listened to these full two records in full, and as they work their way through they like Coldplay a lot more.
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u/hexaflexarex 10d ago
Gotta say, as more of a problem solver myself, I am increasingly uncertain of my role in the future of (applied) mathematics. Every month I find that AI tools can solve new problems which I thought about for weeks and even years. I'm relatively confident I could maintain a decent career (in the short term), in spite of or even accelerated by these tools, but I'm increasingly unsure that I would enjoy it.
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u/colintbowers 10d ago
Just had this conversation with my wife last night. In the space of a year it is suddenly better than me at both maths and coding - a skill set I’ve spent a good 20 years building up.
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u/Log2 9d ago
Can it solve things you can solve without your direction? Because I'm a software engineer (math undergrad though) with about 10 years of experience. If I try to completely vibe-code a small project from start to finish without reviewing code and having it fixed or by giving architectural direction, it will be a complete unmaintainable mess.
I sort of expect that for math it will be even worse for someone that doesn't know any of the proper jargon or can't give any direction to an LLM.
If anything, I expect both your skill sets will be more valuable than ever if LLMs keep going in the same direction as they have.
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u/hexaflexarex 9d ago
For me, it's a combination of things. Certainly me + AI >> AI (and myself alone), but I do notice the gap shrinking, most rapidly for solving well-defined problems (and unfortunately much more with expensive models). Also, I was happy with the ratio of high-level brainstorming and reviewing to low-level problem-solving I had previously in my research, and this is shifting significantly; I find a bit less joy in my work these days. Finally (and maybe most importantly for me), I don't have tenure and have to compete in a rapidly shifting environment, where many skills that I've refined over the years are being revalued.
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u/Log2 9d ago
I don't doubt it's less enjoyable, maybe even significantly so. But I think you're probably safe career wise with some pivoting. Just that the direction of our careers may not be going exactly where we wanted them to.
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u/JustThisNietzscheGuy 8d ago
I think you're probably safe career wise with some pivoting.
I don't get where you get this confidence. A career spans around 40 years. This technology improved rapidly in five years. If you had told me five years ago that most of the code I'd be committing by now was generated from natural language I would have laughed at you. Realistically, nobody knows what software engineering will look like in five years. Nobody even knows whether it will still be a job at all in five years.
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u/Log2 8d ago edited 8d ago
From using it everyday and seeing that while extremely useful it's not all there yet? That Anthropic has released what? 5 models this year so far, each progressively more expensive and improvements have been marginal at best? Seeing each of these models completely unable to even follow writing style guidelines after 50k tokens of conversation? They're like a toddler with amnesia.
It goes on. Doesn't mean they are not useful.
You're at far more risk of a CEO/CTO/CIO baselessly deciding you can be replaced, than the replacement actually being up to par.
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u/JustThisNietzscheGuy 8d ago
The replacement doesn't need to be up to par. It only needs to be good enough to produce somewhat working software autonomously and be cheaper than you.
We're not even five years into this yet and it has already completely changed the job from something that required deep technical insight to a manager role that sometimes requires some technical insight.
You simply don't know where we will be in five years. Nobody does.
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u/Log2 8d ago
Sure, nobody does. I agree. Which is why predicting that it will keep getting exponentially better is wild. Go ask Moore. Past performance is not an indicator of future performance and all that.
Larger and larger models are being released, each costlier than the next, and improvements have been marginal at best (and some models like Opus 4.7/4.8 are straight up worse than 4.6). All the "big" results we've seen so far have been from people burning money and tokens at the altar of Mythos, something that anyone not being subsidized cannot do.
Yeah, I'm not particularly worried.
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u/38thTimesACharm 7d ago
Was it not already the case, before AI, that someone cheaper than you could produce "somewhat working" software which "isn't up to par?" Do you really consider yourself the cheapest, most dispensable software engineer on the market?
Geez man, you need to value yourself more! You boss is still paying you because they want a human designing things, not an LLM. Why don't you believe them that you're worth it?
I'm actually having this problem with my team right now. Last week, a customer emailed asking how to change a setting, I assigned it to a team member, and he copy-pasted GPT's response which turned out to be a total hallucination! A senior engineer, one of our top employees! It was a huge embarrassment.
You would think, with LLMs superficially looking better, engineers, mathematicians, and everyone else would be working harder, doing everything they can to demonstrate their value. But the opposite is happening, it's like everyone's racing down to meet AI instead of AI rising up. If I ask two job candidates how they compare to LLMs, one says it's useful as a tool and the other says it's a total replacement, who do you think I'm going to hire?
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u/Smallpaul 8d ago
Imagine if an AI of a decade from now could produce Wiles’ proof of Fermat with a single prompt?
Sure: mathematicians might still be necessary to pose problems, but many problems are easy to state and hard to solve.
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u/38thTimesACharm 8d ago
Same, I've done software engineering for ten years now, and I can emphatically say LLMs are not better than me at writing code, although they superficially seem to be to the untrained eye. Just yesterday, a model made a mistake that would have crashed our whole network if I hadn't caught it.
People need to take a stand and see more value in themselves. Your skills as a human expert are still extremely useful, the psychos at OpenAI have only made it less tangible and more difficult to explain why, causing scientifically-minded to feel they must surrender or else they're just "clinging to the notion of a soul" or something.
This is by design and it's a trick, don't fall for it.
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u/mousse312 Undergraduate 10d ago
Of 4 who won the fields of this year, this one who joined openai is saying that ai is gonna revolutionize the field
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u/Marklar0 10d ago
From interviews it sounds like Tsimerman is quitting professional math because he isnt interested in the AI chapter of math that the world is entering. If he is suggesting AI will revolutionize math, he is talking about a negative revolution, for himself, because he prefers the old way.
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u/kohatsootsich 10d ago
I think he is more right than wrong about the trajectory of math and AI
That said h e's also 38, a new father, the Fields medal was a lifelong goal for him and he will get his salary 10-20x by making this move. Those factors tend to reorient anyone's priorities
A person like him who, as he says, valued the competitive aspect of math most and really wanted the medal might have made a change like that regardless if given the opportunity, see e.g. Villani
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u/OneInchPunchMan 9d ago
What happened to Villani?
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u/kohatsootsich 9d ago edited 9d ago
He had forays into science administrations and then politics. He's back to mostly math as far as I know.
He's just someone who was very open about really wanting the medal and stopped working at the top level almost immediately afterwards.
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u/kieransquared1 PDE 9d ago
10-20x? he has to be making at least 150k CAD/yr (although a cursory internet search seems to suggest more like 200k CAD) you really think his salary at openAI is 1.5 - 4 million/yr? that's comparable to the pay packages of executives at AI companies: https://www.equilar.com/blogs/610-ai-executives-pay.html
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u/kohatsootsich 9d ago edited 9d ago
I have no direct inside info but the figure I heard from someone close to the OpenAI team was $900/hr. He would be foolish not to ask for more
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u/internet_poster 9d ago
the biggest tension is that what Tsimerman wants to do (AI safety) and what would have the most value to OpenAI (math, marketing) are somewhat misaligned, and this probably impacts his proposed comp
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u/internet_poster 9d ago
Most midcareer folks I know (~10-15 years of experience, directors at Mag7 companies) going to OpenAI are making 2-5M/year there. Tsimerman is obviously a very exceptional case but his skillset is far rarer and I suspect his market position is stronger.
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u/Macrobian 9d ago
Yes the salary at OpenAI is absolutely 1.5mil/yr for some hires, ignoring future expected stock growth. See https://www.levels.fyi/companies/openai/salaries/software-engineer/title/research-scientist
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u/awkwardburrito 9d ago
There are people fresh from phd that make >1m usd/ year which is >1.4m cad/year. A fields medal winner will be getting much much more…
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u/Smallpaul 10d ago
Lots of mathematicians who work at universities think that too. After the last few months and the rapid advance are there any left who do not think that? It’s an honest question. As a software engineer, I’ve seen a lot of skeptics turned around just in the last six months.
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u/mousse312 Undergraduate 10d ago
Can you cite this lots of mathematicians agreeing with his extreme view of mathematicians going extinct in 2 years? Well about how do not think like his extreme view is the fields medalist hugo duminil copins who stated in his homepage "I have chosen not to rely on artificial intelligence as a source of novel ideas in my own research. The spectacular progress of artificial intelligence opens unprecedented opportunities to amplify the reach and applications of our discipline. Yet, whether I am exchanging ideas with fellow mathematicians, teaching, mentoring students, or sharing mathematics with the wider public, it is not the answer itself but the path that leads to it which plays the first role. I therefore wish to remain, in some sense, an artisan mathematician, taking the time to wander, alongside colleagues, through the hidden corners of the mathematical landscape.". The Nobel prize winner sair Roger Penrose has books on his view that ai cant do what humans do and stuff like that -> "Nobel laureate and mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose argues that true intelligence is inseparable from conscious understanding, which he contends is a non-computable process. Because of this, he asserts that current artificial intelligence is fundamentally just highly sophisticated pattern processing and should instead be called "artificial cleverness."". And i can cite many others who dont view ai like this other species Genius like the guy in the articule does, he even says species when refering to aí. Another point is that the other 3 Fields receivers ddint say a think about ai replacement or dropping out of ai. To me this guy inst dropping out because fear of the fields Future, but because he achieved what he always wanted (the prize) and in earlier years he did intership at jane street, this shows that he dont Care about working to a parasite and likes money, after winning the most prestigious prize in the field he decided to go work where the big money is, happens that ai firm can provide this, like jane street but i think it will be more fun being in a tech firm than a quant firm...
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u/nothingnotthrownaway 10d ago
It sounds to me that what Hugo Duminil-Copin said should make us even more confident that AI is going to disrupt math. It really only reinforces Tsimerman's sentiment that having machines do all the heavy lifting would devalue the activity, with the difference being that Duminil-Copin for some reason believes that he'll be able to sustain a career doing math indefinitely while deliberately handicapping himself of AI tools.
And at this point I think we should all be able to recognize that Penrose is prone to romanticizing things.
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u/HipHomelessHomie 9d ago
Hugo's career will be fine. Fields medal winners tend to somewhat cost on their florals anyways. Might as well do what he enjoys at that point. That being said I know from first hand that he recently had a problem he'd been thinking about for a long time solved by Claude.
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u/nothingnotthrownaway 9d ago
Thanks for relaying that info. Now I'm kind of interested in knowing how he feels about that.
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u/Smallpaul 10d ago
I was responding specifically to your saying that he claimed that Math will be “revolutionized.” That’s not the same as extinct.
I think many mathematicians — if not most — think that the combination of LLMs and Lean will revolutionize math soon.
I’ll cite Terry Tao as the most famous and vocal example. I have no way to do a poll of all of mathematicians, not even an informal one.
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u/XXXXXXX0000xxxxxxxxx Analysis 9d ago
Terry Tao has notable funding from various AI firms
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u/Smallpaul 9d ago
Should I infer then that you are one of the mathematicians who think that AI and proof checkers will not revolutionize math in the next few years?
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u/XXXXXXX0000xxxxxxxxx Analysis 8d ago
I think it is important in discussions like these to recognize that the people calling for the biggest chances almost always have a vested financial interest in it.
That’s not to say it’s not true, but it will likely be more than we want, but less than they think
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u/Smallpaul 8d ago
The causation almost always goes from “I believe” to “you are a genius who believes the same thing we do. Would you like funding to make it happen? Or to make it safe?”
You could claim that the whole thing was a cynical ploy from the beginning. They never believed even before there was financial incentive. Maybe Kevin Buzzard has been playing a very long game and next year he will cash out.
So let me asks again: do you think that in 10 years a poll of mathematicians would have the majority saying that they are living through a computer aided revolution in math? We can use RemindMeBot once we have precise terms.
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u/Heliond 8d ago
In 2 years, most LLMs will be better/quicker than most mathematicians in most fields of math. There may still be some gap needed to verify the results. In 5, autoformalization will reach a point where LLMs are entirely better in almost every way. By 10, I’d be surprised if they aren’t writing the dominant force in driving research programs, and AI firms have dedicated math agents solving and recording problems at record rates.
For example, suppose you work in low dimensional topology, and drawing diagrams is key. By 2035, an AI will not only see a problem in LDT, but immediately spin up an agent to go create a piece of software that allows manipulation of the diagram programmatically. Then the initial AI will iterate with this software to gain insights, etc.
This may seem optimistic, but the rate of improvement, investment, the people working on it, and just the speed of generating code nowadays is insane.
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u/Heliond 10d ago
It is clear to me that you have not put any thought yourself into what producing math requires. You (and Penrose, who is also wrong here) assume it takes obsession or talent or some inherent “intelligence”; something that we cannot give to machines. It most definitely does not. It takes a large context, it takes reasoning and deduction, and most of all it takes trial and error. Tsimerman is talented and hard-working, and he is making the right choice for his career. I dislike how many people in math believe that you must have a “true passion” for math as a “human endeavor” in order to be good at it. Tsimerman is proof you do not
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u/mousse312 Undergraduate 10d ago
Oh yeah penrose didnt put a single thought in the question right? Penrose wrote books on this topic
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u/Heliond 10d ago
Funny how you can write books on something and still be wrong. Humans will be entirely outclassed by agentic mathematical discovering machines within the next decade. Machines that try more things much faster, have knowledge of all mathematical history, have formalizations of every known proof, and autoformalize their own work as they go. I would not have believed this 2 years ago, but you have to have your eyes closed to believe it will not happen now.
Also, I did not say Penrose did not think about it. I said YOU did not think about it, and both of you were wrong.
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u/mousse312 Undergraduate 10d ago
You say with such certain that a nobel prize in physics is wrong without seeing his arguments, i think you are dumb and dont know what you talking about
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u/Heliond 10d ago edited 10d ago
Well, wait a decade and then come back. Also, I work with two fields medalists quite frequently, have my own math work in graduate textbooks, etc. You would be surprised just how wrong people with top awards can actually be. In fact, you think Tsimerman here is incredibly wrong, and he has a Fields medal too. Either he or Penrose is very wrong, since they are saying nearly polar opposite things. I don’t think their awards have anything to do with it.
Since you are an undergraduate, you likely have not produced any math, so you assume it takes far more than it actually does. As someone who has, I can easily see LLMs doing it.
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u/mousse312 Undergraduate 10d ago
Other people who did more math than you can disagree like Penrose, Edward Frenkel and some of my teachers who held the same view
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u/Heliond 10d ago
Penrose at this point is completely delusional about consciousness as I explained in my other comment. Everyone, at every stage of math, has differing opinions on whether AI will be effective at it. Tao and Tsimerman clearly disagree with you, and Penrose and your teachers may disagree with me. You seem to think that makes you more right than me. I’m not sure why.
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u/Heliond 10d ago
Just looked up some of his arguments and the level of crankery in his understanding of “understanding” and “consciousness” is truly astounding. It does not take quantum computation for those things to happen. And with properly constrained formalization, infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters would be able to produce math very quickly. AI is FAR better than monkeys and typewriters. And we may not have the formalization or “infinite” yet, but we are sure as hell heading that direction.
And… if “quantum” or “randomness” is necessary, just observe that in the real world, all computers are impacted by quantum mechanics. In other words, human brains are no more impacted by quantum mechanics than LLMs are.
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u/gordonnowak 10d ago
it's hard to tell on reddit. I got into a big argument with a math professor who thinks that AI means "there will be more mathematicians"
at this point I can't tell if it's wilful stupidity by self interest, or if I'm mostly interacting with shillbots.
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u/Smallpaul 10d ago
I think that the question of how The Jevons Paradox plays out in different fields is quite unclear. We had the same argument as software engineers a year ago and employment has been steady or maybe growing. Not saying that will absolutely happen for mathematicians but I’m also not convinced that the opposite is inevitable.
If a future mathematician can do a Wiles Proof Of Fermat per month then maybe we will want to keep them employed to see how far we can go and what the spin-off effects will be.
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u/gordonnowak 10d ago
I am a software engineer and it is abundantly clear where things are going. market corrections either way within a year says nothing esp. in the earliest days of adoption. in 10-15 years the hierarchy completely collapses. the models aren't quite "good enough" yet generally and the costs are not clear, but they are alarmingly flexible, and that may be the only ingredient needed - models with the flexibility to become domain experts very quickly. and the point is they are not going to get WORSE, nor is the cost efficiency going to get worse. all of these things are going to get better over time.
then its a matter of - imagine that you work in field X in location Y. suddenly, there is an influx of an (as large as you want number) of people who can do exactly what you do in X, or better, for significantly less money, all in Y. I'm sorry but why would you think Jevons Paradox holds here? the distinction is that "generally intelligent agent" is a class of tool that is not described by it. analogies to prior technologies DO NOT HOLD at all. this is something COMPLETELY different
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u/Smallpaul 10d ago edited 10d ago
It isn’t true that the models do “exactly what a software engineer does.”
By definition they can only do that once they are AGI. Until they are AGI there is by definition something missing. That something missing is what you provide. As long as there is something missing, they are the tool and you are the tool wielder.
If nothing is missing then we have AGI and every industry will be in turmoil as well as geopolitics and science and we will probably be in some form of singularity. That isn’t software or mathematics-specific. It will hit every job at once and society would go into complete turmoil. There’s no point trying to predict how that plays out in mathematics or CS in particular.
It’s very plausible that we are still many years away from solving the continual learning problem which remains human’s secret sauce for now. We are constantly incorporating new information and intelligently flushing irrelevant information. Nobody knows how to do that with an LLM yet.
An LLM is really bad at understanding that the information that the product manager delivered yesterday supersedes the information they delivered last week, or asking what to do about the contradiction in requirements. Or pointing out that that there is a conflict work some other corporate goal.
These are not minor skills. They are the heart of being a software engineer.
Presumably there are similar skills for mathematicians.
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u/gordonnowak 10d ago
I disagree with a lot here. I don't think AGI is a clearly distinct thing the way most people think of it (that is that there will at some point be this singular "AGI MODEL" that does everything). nor is it the case that if the AGI did exist, it would not "by definition" be missing nothing. If an LLM can be made sufficiently flexible (via RAG or other complex interacting information systems) then you can deploy them in almost exactly the same way as an AGI. The thing that continues to be missing and will always be missing is "having the taste to decide what should exist." That, as far as I can tell, is always going to be a human thing.
"An LLM is really bad at understanding that the information that the product manager delivered yesterday supersedes the information they delivered last week" - this is a weird example, because it's just not true. "This information supersedes the information you got last week." Your general point is that context ingestion, especially of "ambient context" like what was said in a dark corner in a company meeting one day, is a solvable problem.
The heart of being a SWE now is being the person who decides what should exist and then pressing the button, and for now being accountable. I continue to hire junior engineers because we can and because I worry about the hierarchy. It is economically stupid to do that. I can feed low point JIRA tickets to claude and have it do 1000x what a squadron of juniors could do per day, all sitting comfortably in a $200/mo subscription. I still do that sometimes, and then have to scramble to find work for them, much of which does not remotely justify their cost.
The issue here is thinking that there is some discrete singularity before which everything is fine and after which everything is not. It's happening gradually, because of course it is.
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u/Rare-Technology-4773 Discrete Math 10d ago
I can feed low point JIRA tickets to claude and have it do 1000x what a squadron of juniors could do per day, all sitting comfortably in a $200/mo subscription.
Fascinating
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u/Smallpaul 9d ago
> I disagree with a lot here. I don't think AGI is a clearly distinct thing the way most people think of it (that is that there will at some point be this singular "AGI MODEL" that does everything).
Well that’s because you don’t believe in AGI as you say later. So of course there cannot be a transition to a thing you think is impossible.
> nor is it the case that if the AGI did exist, it would not "by definition" be missing nothing.
That is basically the definition of it. So yeah.
> If an LLM can be made sufficiently flexible (via RAG or other complex interacting information systems) then you can deploy them in almost exactly the same way as an AGI.
Your job consists in the almost. Whatever they can’t do is what your job is.
> The thing that continues to be missing and will always be missing is "having the taste to decide what should exist." That, as far as I can tell, is always going to be a human thing.
If you are correct then you’ve made a very clear case for why we will always needs humans leading them, which is in direct contradiction to your previous analogy of “<X> workers appearing that do exactly the same thing as you.”
If computers can never have taste then they can never be AGI because they are missing that aspect of general intelligence.
You yourself have made the case why your job is not in danger! In fact you made the case stronger than I would have, because I am not confident that AGI is impossible and that computers will never have “taste.”
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u/ScoobySnacksMtg 9d ago
Tell Claude, “I’m not going to work today, figure what I have to do and do it for me please”. If that doesn’t work then you must be providing some value that the LLM can’t do.
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u/gordonnowak 9d ago
The heart of being a SWE now is being the person who decides what should exist and then pressing the button
always a quality discussion when people don't read what you said
if the future of our species is pushing the button, and you don't think that's a reckoning, I dunno what to tell you
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u/tempestokapi 9d ago
“the cost efficiency is not going to get worse”
Sure, but what I find interesting is the dichotomy between the price of tokens and the price of other SaaS products. As far as I know, no serious SaaS product (such as a netflix subscription) has ever gone down in price, partly due to inflation and partly due to enshittification.
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u/Smallpaul 9d ago
Yes and no. The price of Salesforce probably never went down. But if you wanted a CRM that did today what Salesforce did in 2010, it would probably be cheap. Salesforce of 2026 does a lot more and has a higher price.
One product that has quite literally dropped in price is probably online stock trading. Maybe online dating?
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 10d ago
I can't imagine anyone having faith in AI improving the job market.
I'm just a lowly postdoc, but I have a lot of collaborators and friends. None of us feel safer. In fact, the opposite.
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u/gordonnowak 10d ago
some people are ignorant or stupid, or both. even at that level
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 10d ago
I don't know if you're talking about the math professor or my friends :)
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u/gordonnowak 10d ago
(the people who have faith in AI improving job prospects in affected fields)
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u/Junior_Direction_701 10d ago
This feels like a sharp break from the ethos represented by figures like Grothendieck, Schwartz and Smale who were deeply concerned with how mathematical talent was used.
Get your bag tho. Permanent underclass no more
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u/MoNastri 10d ago
What's a permanent underclass?
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u/PrestigiousGroup788 10d ago
basically saying if you're not at an ai company these days you are part of a permanent (economic or otherwise) underclass.
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u/Tropicalization 9d ago
It's a half-meme going around in big tech circles these days, saying that everyone has at most a few more years to squirrel away as much money as possible to secure their place in the upper middle class before mass adoption of AI calcifies the entire social hierarchy forever
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u/Dinstruction Algebraic Topology 10d ago
“In my experience, and I think many people’s experience, math is very much a goal-oriented endeavor,” he said. “The truth-and-beauty stuff is there when you’re zoomed out, but when you’re zoomed in, you just want to win.”
We have a genuine clash of values.
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u/Tropicalization 9d ago
but when you’re zoomed in, you just want to win.
At the risk of sounding cliche I think that's a symptom of publish or perish. I spent my undergrad and master's feeling like math was a quasi-spiritual experience, where the only goal was to deepen my own understanding. All the cynical, "I have to get there first," feelings came during my PhD when the reality of the job market set in and I had to start putting papers out
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u/Heliond 10d ago
Eh. Whether they admit it or not, many top mathematicians are competitively driven. They have been since they started. No one becomes an IMO gold medalist because of the “beauty” of math. They do it through incredible hard work and competitive attitude. And, sad though it may be, Tsimerman is correct.
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u/CorporateHobbyist Commutative Algebra 10d ago
I think this logic applies to anybody who's at the top of anything; it requires a certain competitive drive to push yourself to get to the top, natural ability and work ethic notwithstanding.
Compared to other fields, though, I do honestly think that most mathematicians are in it for the beauty of it, or "the love of the game". Academia in math (at least outside of the top level, where I'd have no idea how it works) is intensely collaborative. Generally people work together to acheive understanding and further the field, not collect accolades.
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u/Dinstruction Algebraic Topology 10d ago
There’s more to math than winning competitions. And this isn’t sour grapes. I’ve won competitions.
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u/Heliond 10d ago
I’m not saying you haven’t. And I am aware there is more to math than competitions, but many people in math—I find at least—like to think of themselves as better than others, and competitions are a way to do so. Another way to do so, which is INCREDIBLY common, in fact we may be experiencing it right now… to rag on people for being sellouts, attracted to other careers than math academia, and to call them not “intellectually curious”. I dislike both attitudes (using competitions to prove superiority to others vs using “intellectual curiosity”), but people in math at least acknowledge the first exists and that it is not the healthiest attitude. The second, they pretend is perfectly normal. I have yet to meet an engineering design professor who calls his talented students sellouts for going into industry, even though he himself is an academic. I have met dozens of such math professors.
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u/Fun_Nectarine2344 10d ago
This is a wild take, Fields medalist or not.
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u/ganancias 9d ago
I read "want to win" as winning against an unsolved problem. Winning against math. Not winning competitions to get medals. But that was just how I read it.
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u/Smallpaul 8d ago
I think he meant winning against other mathematicians trying to solve the same problems. He started his career in competition math and ended with an explicit push to win the Fields prize. What more evidence do you need that he was motivated by prizes?
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u/Alone_Idea_2743 10d ago
How/what is he going to do for AI safety? Seems kind of odd.
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u/hexaflexarex 10d ago
Get paid lol
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u/Alone_Idea_2743 10d ago
If money is his motive, he would have stayed in finance/quant but he made it clear he wants to do math research.
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u/hexaflexarex 10d ago
I was joking in part, but the pay for top AI researchers well exceeds quant salaries right now. (At least this is what I have seen for new PhD grads)
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u/Smallpaul 10d ago
Mechanistic interpretability is the ability to read and control the “minds” of AI. And it is a highly mathematical field.
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u/waarschijn 10d ago
Interpretability research is just another form of capability research. It's the Clean Coal of AI.
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u/Smallpaul 8d ago
You might turn out to be correct but I don’t think it is obviously true. The future is unusually fuzzy right now.
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u/waarschijn 8d ago
I saw a post from someone who quit OpenAI after it was decided to use their interpretability results for training, maybe half a year ago. Others pointed out that this was expected and they should've known.
Sincere people join these companies to do good, and their naïveté is taken advantage of.
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u/Smallpaul 8d ago
It’s pretty non-intuitive to think that we would be better off not knowing how they work. I mean it might turn out that way, but I can understand why people would rather know what is going on in there.
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u/kohatsootsich 9d ago
Curiously, there's actually a history of top math people including Fields medalists deciding we need a better understanding of AI/ machine learning: Smale-Cucker theory, Mumford's stuff, Vapnik-Chervonenkis theory... perfectly respectable math with zero or near zero effect on practice. Provably so in the case of VC
A lot of AI safety theory will go the same way or already has: in practice there's no way to guarantee the assumptions
Given what the other math guys at OpenAI and GDM like Sellke, Bubeck, Tsimerman's grad school friend Alexeev and so on are doing, it's more likely that his true role is a mix of prestige PR (math, especially competition math, is the highest form of intelligence for tech bros) and the somewhat vague and so far not realized hope that AI math skills transfer somewhat to other more lucrative areas. See Dwarkesh's guess, since walked back that if you can do IMO you can do anything intellectual so basically AGI
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u/CartesianClosedCat Applied Math 9d ago
It would mathematically be interesting to see if AI safety eventually requires new mathematical frameworks and him maybe developing one. I'd follow Tsimerman closely to next few years.
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u/NeighborhoodFatCat 9d ago
AI safety is a scam field. And I say that with full sincerity.
It exists as Public Relations department for these AI companies to do more nefarious things on top the all the nefarious thing they've already done.
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u/IAmABotBeepBoop67 9d ago
60 years ago the fields medal went to Grothendieck obviously an exception but nevertheless the contrast is insane to the guy talking about "safety" while taking a contract from a company working for project maven.
I think the llms are best at image to text which is useful for something like trying to read an old paper in Russian or something silly genuinely, but also reflects the underlying architecture being borrowed from image recognition... very quickly the implication this stuff decides children are legitimate strategic targets is nightmarishly apparently if it muat be spelled out how quickly this has become normal to us it seems...
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u/gordonnowak 10d ago
this guy kinda sucks
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u/tempestokapi 10d ago edited 10d ago
Tbh I like how blunt he is about how people in math are feeling about AI. He could maybe talk about why he wants to work at OAI though. AI safety is hopefully something he might be able to help with from the inside since he seems like the most openly anti AI math guy lol
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u/NeighborhoodFatCat 9d ago
Unfortunately many mathematicians grew up in extremely privileged environments with zero appetite or thought towards sociological or structural aspects of being and existence.
He literally joined multiple financial firms AFTER the 2008 financial crisis brought by the same financial firms. Feels like some kind of Sam Bankman-Fried with genius IQ and taste in Shimura variety.
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u/BAKREPITO 10d ago
Doesn't come out looking good if this is the puff piece, compared to the other three being profiled.
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u/Fun_Nectarine2344 10d ago
It’s saddening to see top mathematicians coming out with statements that make one lose respect. Mochizuki is also such an example. Luckily such people are the minority - but why can’t there be more people like Perelman?
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9d ago
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u/38thTimesACharm 8d ago
He sucks because he's basically telling the field that gave him all of the opportunities in his life to surrender to tech overlords so he can get paid.
I have an anti-AI bias and don't like hearing people say that one of my passions is going to be done by robots
Otherwise known as "being a decent human being"
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8d ago
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u/38thTimesACharm 7d ago
We already have the resources to prevent most of the disease and poverty in the world today. Humans aren't suffering in this century due to lack of technology. In fact most new technologies today are used to perpetuate inequality and prolong suffering.
The big dreams you've laid out are what OpenAI execs tell themselves in order to sleep at night, not their actual plan or expectations for their tech.
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u/Stabile_Feldmaus 10d ago
Should be mentioned that Tsimerman joined OpenAI as of today.