Kevin Hartnett posted the following Friday:
My profile of @Jacob_Tsimerman, published the morning he won the Fields Medal, and hours before he announced he’s going to @OpenAI, reads like a requiem for a field.
While I’m trying to not spend too much time thinking about the ongoing story of the effect of AI agents on math, the story of Jacob Tsimerman’s Fields medal award coinciding with his announcement that he’s leaving research math to go work of OpenAI is hard to ignore. If you do want to spend time thinking about the implications of this, it’s worth reading the profiles at the New York Times as well as Hartnett’s at Quanta Magazine. Also very much worth reading is Tsimerman’s own explanation (in an exchange with Daniel Litt) of how he sees things. This was written before the OpenAI announcement, but goes a ways towards explaining Tsimerman’s decision.
A few personal comments: I’ve never had any interest in the kind of competitive problem solving Tsimerman specializes in, so have no idea if he’s right that humans will no longer be able to compete with the AI agents in this area within the next few years. His current situation makes him a very special case. In the Quanta profile he explains that he quit math competitions once he got a perfect score at the 2004 IMO, figuring it best to stop at the top of his game. Winning a Fields medal puts one in an analogous situation professionally: there are lots more awards you could get, but that’s the big one.
In addition, while a Fields medal comes with academic job offers that allow one to do whatever one wants and be very well-paid to do it, our tech overlords at OpenAI can and do pay a great deal more.
Finally, if you’re the competitive sort, what’s happening is making competitive problem solving much less attractive. It’s not just that the AI agents may beat you, it’s that the game is now being played very differently. When you’re competing against other mathematicians, there are strong norms about crediting ideas to those who came up with them, something that AI agents have no interest in doing. The situation isn’t quite like the situation in chess, where powerful chess programs got to the point they could beat humans, but human to human chess competition survived. Where we’re going could be analogous to chess playing where everyone is using, with or without acknowledging it, some sort of chess program. “Winning” at this will be something very different than pre-AI.
My own interests are quite different than Tsimerman’s. Math competitions never had any appeal to me. This was partly because I’ve never been competitive or much interested in “winning” anything. Also, why spend time on intricate math problems chosen mainly because they could be expressed in elementary terms and solved by elementary methods when there is so much beautiful and powerful non-elementary mathematics to learn about? As one learns mathematics there are always new depths to explore, and these depths seem to contain unexpected ideas that explain what is going on in fundamental theoretical physics, a subject with its own challenging depths to explore. So far I haven’t seen AI agents doing anything new and important that I would care about, but maybe that’s just a matter of time…
Update: Timothy Gowers (another Fields medalist and IMO winner with a perfect score) has a long blog post with his thought about the Leiden declaration at his blog.
