‘I’m Really Terrified’: A Mathematician Grapples With AI’s Recent Breakthroughs

Mathematician and author Steven Strogatz starts to cry when he talks about the artificial-intelligence-driven breakthroughs in his field over the past week.

“The science is thrilling,” the Cornell University professor says, “but there’s a lot of human unpleasantness going with it.”

On Tuesday, OpenAI said it had used tens of thousands of agents to solve a 90-year-old math problem, which had a $1 million prize attached. The solution—which still needs to be independently verified—builds on a strategy developed by Spanish mathematicians Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa. The announcement was marred by claims from another mathematician, Tristan Buckmaster, who