顶尖数学家担心 AI 正让数学领域变蠢，并警告我们其他人是下一个

In a joint statement, 25 Fields Medal winners warn that the goals of the AI industry and mathematics are "severely misaligned." They argue that mass-producing solved problems with AI undermines conceptual understanding, the true goal of the discipline. The signatories see this as a symptom of a broader threat to intellectual work, where the process of learning matters more than the end product. Twenty-five Fields Medal winners warn that the goals of the AI industry and those of mathematics are "severely misaligned." Mass-producing solved problems with AI could undermine the discipline's real purpose: understanding. In a joint statement , 25 winners of the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, warn about AI's impact on their field. Large language models have gotten so good at math in recent months that they can now crack "major outstanding problems in many fields of mathematics." That's exactly what worries them. AI companies are treating math problems as benchmarks to conquer, and it's hurting the science and the surrounding community, the statement says. The goals of AI companies and those of mathematicians are "severely misaligned." Signatory Terence Tao had already warned about an AI-driven foundational crisis in mathematics . Ad Famous unsolved problems "have often served as landmarks and lighthouses against which one can measure an improved understanding of this landscape," the statement says. When someone cracks one, the solution matters less than the new thinking it took to get there. Mathematicians then spend years pulling that thinking apart in a "long and arduous process of talks, discussions, simplifications." Ad AI threatens to short-circuit that process. "Solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight," the signatories write. Flooding the field with answers at machine speed could "destroy fertile ground instead of breathing life into new ideas." AI-generated solutions get announced with "no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others." That raises "severe attribution and plagiarism questions." Ad "Without the willing mathematicians who must take care of their development and integration into the mathematical canon, AI-conceived ideas would never become fully alive," the statement reads. "The crucial human transmission chain between mathematicians would be lost." The statement lands amid a controversy between two mathematicians and OpenAI . The accusation: OpenAI caught wind of rumors about a partial solution to a Millennium Prize Problem and tried to beat the researchers to it for the publicity. OpenAI chief researcher Pachocki had said during the Astra announcement that the company deliberately chose not to optimize the model for math. Shortly after, OpenAI apparently trained math models anyway, seemingly in direct response to those rumors. Ad The signatories see a "general threat to intellectual work." Across many fields, years of training have "served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas." When AI produces "the results of such work directly," those purposes come apart. Ad