The AI 'mathpocalypse': Artificial intelligence systems crack hundreds of unsolved problems, sparking fears that mathematicians could become obsolete

OpenAI has sparked a crisis in the mathematics world after announcing an unreleased artificial intelligence tool has cracked hundreds of unsolved problems.On Tuesday, the tech giant behind ChatGPT published a trove of 722 papers containing full or partial solutions to 372 of the hardest problems in maths.These included two of the seven famously intractable Millennium Prize Problems, each of which carries a $1 million (£755,000) bounty if solved.The release, which has already been dubbed the 'mathpocalypse', now has mathematicians wondering if their discipline could become obsolete.It comes just a month after OpenAI released a proposed proof of the Navier-Stokes equation, another Millennium Prize Problem. Experts have been stunned by AI's rapid advancement, developing from systems that struggled with GCSE papers to PhD-level experts in just two years.However, many are furious with OpenAI's approach, with one warning it will 'destroy the mathematical community.' OpenAI announced that an unreleased artificial intelligence (AI) has cracked hundreds of unsolved problems, sparking a crisis in the mathematics worldAs the mathematicians sort through the enormous tranche of data, the academic community has become bitterly divided over whether OpenAI has acted responsibly.On one hand, some mathematicians have hailed the release as one of the most significant contributions to the discipline in recent years.Dr Levent Alpöge, a mathematician working for AI firm Anthropic, wrote on X: 'It’s obviously the most significant moment in mathematical history.'However, many experts in the field have been outraged by what they call OpenAI's 'unsustainable' approach.Foregoing the traditional peer-review and journal publication process, OpenAI elected to 'dump' the solutions directly onto GitHub, a code repository website.These supposed proofs will take months for mathematicians to sort through and verify, and serious errors are already being discovered.Just days after publishing, the company was forced to retract three of the papers due to elementary errors and amend many others that contained issues which invalidated their results.Writing on The Conversation, Dr Melissa Lee, of Monash University, says: 'This suggests, at the least, a lack of sufficient vetting before publication.'Likewise, many mathematicians who have tried to assess the papers claim that they are poorly written and, in some cases, contain nothing besides incomprehensible 'unreadable slop'.Dr Lee says: 'A senior colleague of mine found one of his favourite problems among those solved and attempted to read the accompanying paper. He told me it was so unintelligible that, had he received it as an editor at a mathematics journal, "it would have gone straight into the bin".' On Tuesday, the tech giant behind ChatGPT published a trove of 722 papers containing full or partial solutions to 372 of the hardest problems in mathsIn a blog post announcing the solutions, OpenAI wrote: 'We want this progress to push the frontier of human knowledge and enable further progress in mathematics.'However, many mathematicians have accused the company of failing to help maths advance in any meaningful way.Terence Tao, a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians, wrote on Mastodon: 'Problems are being solved autonomously by AI prompters who have no interest in the broader field itself once their initial target is "solved", and do not understand the AI output well enough to answer questions on the result, give talks, or otherwise interact with the rest of the field.'He continued: 'Solutions to open problems are now being harvested at large scale in an unsustainable fashion, leaving entire fields of mathematics much less fertile than when such problems were solved in the traditional "Math 1.0" fashion.'Meanwhile, the Association for Human Mathematics, a group of over 800 leading mathematicians, released a damning statement urging researchers to break their associations with OpenAI.The group said: 'We reject OpenAI's assertion that this release advances our subject.'Adding: 'Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power.'OpenAI claims that its methods for releasing solutions were developed by consulting with the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Advanced Study⁠.However, this group says that they specifically advised OpenAI against using their models to crack unproven solutions and share the results without explanation. OpenAI claims that the proofs were released to 'push the frontier of human knowledge', but mathematicians claim their behaviour has been unhelpful and 'unsustainable'. Pictured: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman The group claims: 'We want to state clearly from the start: we do not endorse this practice, and we ask them to stop testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary models.'Similarly, many mathematicians have shared their accounts of seeing work that occupied their entire careers completed overnight.Professor Hugo Duminil-Copin, a leading mathematician from Université de Genève who was awarded a Fields Medal - the discipline's highest honour - in 2022, was one of dozens who shared their stories on the Proofs and Prompts forum.He wrote: 'I expected that one day we would be surpassed, and that it would happen systematically. But yesterday’s announcement hit with a force I had not anticipated.'Dozens of papers deal with topics I was working on. Between results that beat you to the finish line and thousand-page proofs, I don’t even know where to look anymore.'Likewise, Professor Henry Wilton, of the University of Cambridge, simply wrote: 'If OpenAI wanted to destroy the mathematical community, this would be a great way to go about it.'