While AI researchers have been congratulating each other after Google DeepMind officially delivered a gold-medal winning performance at the International Mathematics Olympiad and OpenAI also claimed to do so on internal tests, the reaction has been markedly different among some people from a different set — professional mathematicians.
Dave White, who is a Research Partner at Paradigm, a research-driven investment firm, has said that seeing an AI model win an International Mathematics Olympiad Gold has felt like a “gut-punch”, and said that “it’s kind of like dying”. White was previously a quantitative trader and researcher, and is three credits shy of an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard University.
“The OpenAI IMO news hit me pretty heavy this weekend,” he wrote on X. “I’m still in the acute phase of the impact, I think,” he added.
“I consider myself a professional mathematician, and I don’t think I can answer a single IMO question. Ok, yes, IMO is its own little athletic subsection of math for which i have not trained, etc, but, if I meet someone in the wild who has an IMO gold, I immediately update to “this person is much better at math than i am”. Now a bunch of robots can do it. As someone who has a lot of their identity and their actual life built around “is good at math,” it’s a gut punch. It’s a kind of dying,” he said.
White likened his feelings to someone who’s spent a lot of time to learn to talk to dogs. They enjoyed what they do, and and their skills were unique and valued. But then a universal dog translator becomes available for very cheap, rendering their skills worthless.
“Of course, grief for my personal identity as a mathematician (and/or productive member of society) is the smallest part of this story,” he said. “Multiply that grief out by *every* mathematician, by every coder, maybe every knowledge worker, every artist… over the next few years… it’s a slightly bigger story,” he added.
The post hit home to many, and was reposted nearly 500 times on X. It’s a feeling that many knowledge workers have been grappling with for the last few months. These people had spent their entire careers becoming quite proficient at a skill, and many of them enjoyed what they did. Now AI now is able to do what they earlier did, nearly instantaneously and at a fraction of the cost. And while this might lead to job losses, as many in tech have been predicting, it can also lead to an even greater loss of meaning.