Sep 11, 2026, 5:40 PMA group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: https://mathandai.org/ . We welcome additional signatories (similar to the Leiden declaration), as can be seen on the page. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/09/11/top-mathematicians-are-outraged-by-openais-methods
Sep 11, 2026, 7:01 PM@tao , sounds great. But... what is the proposal? Meaning, how do you think this can be solved? Because if you basically tell AI companies "I don't like this" without providing an alternative, I'm very much afraid it won't do much good... You need to come down to the real world and propose something tangible, and I say this with all my love and support. Best of luck; in other disciplines, we haven't been listened to, or, like in cybersecurity, it has simply become an asset accessible only to corporate elites and governments...
@tao I love it that you write “the scientific and creative proffessions”. This is a time that calles for solidarity. "AI" has alredy undermined the creative communities with generative images and text, and is threatening the computing community with generative code, but we have been mostly silent, if not participating in this undermining as these were not our fields. Now that it reaches us maybe it will shake us enough to look around and see the pattern.
@tao if the recent example is typical, for an LLM to “solve” a math problem it needs to be trained on drafts of an incomplete proof by human mathematicians that turns out to be on the right track, used by a team of about 10 times as many people as wrote those drafts, and spend about a decades worth of funding for related math problems on generating attempted proofs. (See https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117237800074111038)
The trivial solution is to tax the rich and fund mathematicians.
@tao I appreciate the post, but can’t get rid of the feeling of watching the character of DiCaprio in “Don’t Look Up” trying to be diplomatic when one side would be literally destroying another as long as it can profit from it.
Sep 12, 2026, 3:08 AM@tao The Economist requires your email address to read this, which means they are taking notes on who is interested in this.
Very Economic of them.