"AI Race to Solve Math Problems Poses Threat to Intellectual Activity"...Warning from 25 Fields Medalists

"Conceptual Understanding and Insight Matter More Than Solutions Themselves"

Statement Released Immediately After OpenAI Announces 'Solving a Major Challenge'

Winners of the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, have expressed concerns over the race among artificial intelligence (AI) companies to solve unsolved mathematical problems.

According to major foreign media outlets on September 11 (local time), 25 Fields Medal winners, including Korean-American mathematician June Huh, a professor at Princeton University, and Terence Tao, issued a joint letter warning that the AI-driven race to solve mathematical problems could cause long-term harm to the mathematics community.

The laureates emphasized that in mathematics, solving problems itself is not the ultimate goal. They stated, “The process of solving problems is merely a tool and a means to achieve the fundamental goal of conceptual understanding and insight,” stressing that gaining mathematical insight requires time and interaction among people.

They added, “As AI is changing the way we work, we must not lose sight of the value we sought to achieve through these activities,” pointing out that this poses a threat not only to mathematics but to human intellectual activity as a whole. Accordingly, they urged that not only the mathematics community but also AI companies and society as a whole must urgently discuss the potential impact of AI on mathematical research and how to respond.

This statement was released immediately after OpenAI announced that it had used AI to solve the “Navier–Stokes problem,” one of the Millennium Problems, in just 88 hours. OpenAI said it mobilized thousands of AI agents, exchanged 2.7 million messages, and used approximately 130 billion tokens.

However, allegations of unauthorized idea appropriation also surfaced during this process. Just before the announcement, Professor Tristan Buckmaster of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University (NYU) and mathematician Levent Alpoge of Anthropic had released related research results first. Professor Buckmaster claimed that OpenAI had mimicked the approach that he and his team had developed for several months. OpenAI denied the allegation, saying it had not accessed the research in question.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.