'Solving problems is not the ultimate goal'

'A means to conceptual understanding and insight'

Reference image. [Getty Images Bank]
Reference image. [Getty Images Bank]

Winners of the Fields Medal, mathematics' most prestigious prize, have raised concerns about the race among AI companies to solve unsolved mathematical problems.

Twenty-five Fields Medal laureates, including Korean-American mathematician June Huh, a professor at Princeton University, issued a joint letter warning that the AI-driven competition to solve mathematical problems could cause long-term harm to the field, according to AFP on Friday (local time).

"Solving problems is merely a tool and a proxy for achieving the fundamental goal of conceptual understanding and insight," they said in the letter.

They added that "the process of gaining mathematical understanding and insight takes time, and human interaction also plays an important role."

They went on to say that "as AI transforms the way we work, we must not lose sight of what we were originally trying to achieve through that work."

The joint letter came shortly after OpenAI announced that it had used AI to solve the Navier-Stokes problem — one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, the most celebrated unsolved challenges in mathematics — in 88 hours.

Thousands of AI agents were reportedly deployed simultaneously to crack the problem. OpenAI said the agents exchanged about 2.7 million messages and used approximately 130 billion tokens to solve the Navier-Stokes equations.


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