How AI Is Upending the World of Mathematics
It couldn't count the r's in strawberry a while back, and now it's doing fluid dynamics. Check the proof before the press release gets a Nobel.
Last month, OpenAI announced that it had produced an AI-generated proof for the Navier-Stokes problem. LLMs used to be bad at counting, but now they are solving math problems that have stumped humans for decades. Meanwhile, at universities, the problem of AI in education continues: Now that LLMs can do a student's homework, teachers are struggling to keep up. It is clear that AI is very quickly changing how math is taught and how it is practiced by professionals. Justin Solomon, who is the associate dean for engineering education at MIT, gives us a primer on how mathematicians (both pure and applied) are responding to all the advances in AI. He also explains what exactly the Navier-Stokes problem is and why the OpenAI proof is hard for even the pros to parse, what movies get wrong about how mathematicians do their jobs, and how he's changing his pedagogical approach in the age of AI. (Source: Bloomberg)
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