The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence

I knew mathematicians were a smart bunch, but honestly, the events of the past few weeks have really given me a new level of respect for them.

They might be the first community I've seen to experience the AI "rush" and (at least as presented to an outside observer) immediately come together, assess the situation, and calmly, empathetically, and rationally act. They evaluated what AI is good at and what it lacks. They've thought through how it'll likely affect their field in the future. They've explained where the need for humans still lies, and made clear proposals for how to change their own field and for what demands to make of AI companies. Of course they're not all on the same page, but they're at least talking and trying.

They haven't started worshipping the machine god and loudly claiming their whole field is solved. Nor have they flailed wildly at LLMs as if complaining enough about it will make them go away.

Every major statement I've seen come out of the math community on this matter reads as well thought-through, humble, reasoned, and deeply human.

In these days of fear, uncertainty, and obsolescence anxiety, honestly, they've given me some confidence that maybe we will figure this stuff out after all. Maybe we'll learn from them. Who knows.

I don't really get it, seems like a gate keeping exercise for the academic community.

Of course OpenAI and others will hype any LLM led/assisted research results, and the media will find juicy headlines to write about it. But in the end they are publishing findings, and the academic community can gauge the developments and decide what they want to do with them. To me that seems like research working as expected.

Academics are the kings of, and have the most to gain from, gatekeeping.

"This is changing the power we have, let's create a new power structure where we're still at the top, and in control."

No surprise here.

The purpose is obvious - AI companies are using math to as a PR tool to demonstrate that AI is more capable than humans. This devalues math and mathematicians. There is even a relevant announcement from today, where OpenAI announced they solve 100 open math problems, without even bothering to state what they are.

However, even if they are successful in removing math from the PR toolkit of AI companies, I can’t see it more than a short term band aid. If AI progression continues, the announcements will just transition from big flashy one, to a kid using Claude on their laptop.

I don’t have a solution here, and I’m worried it’s coming to all human fields. So it’s more of an ability to observe what might happen to all of us.

A comment on the linked post from Burt Totaro:

> If I thought this was a good thing to do, this would be a great group of people to do it. But I have immediate misgivings. OpenAI has had some very bad publicity, and so they are trying to exploit the trust and respect that these mathematicians command. It is unrealistic to think that this group can change the way OpenAI does business; I don’t need to tell you all the objections that people have raised to that. Is it a good idea to help their crisis management?

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/21/advisory-group-on-...

I really wish the models were smart enough to "tail their own logs" and tell us whose work/papers/chats were the catalyst for these math insights. What makes their "internal" model so much better at math? Must be trained on a whole lot of honesty.

discussion of oai announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790389

Is the advisory group abelian? I'll see myself out...

Okay so more ivory tower slop.

Why aren't they consulting the younger mathematicians whom this actually affects?

Anyways, this is overblown. Let me know when AI swarms can create a research program or library from scratch. We're really missing long term planning and abstraction creation in these things.

Related:

Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (OpenAI post)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790389

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