Fields Medalist's Warning: "It's Like a Game That Lost Its Purpose"

[Anchor]

World-renowned mathematicians have expressed concerns over the unchecked speed race of AI companies. They warn that mathematics could lose its original purpose and turn into a game.

Reporter Choi Seung-hun asked Professor June Huh, a Fields Medalist often referred to as the Nobel Prize of mathematics, for his thoughts.

[Reporter]

Recently, OpenAI announced that it deployed AI agents to find a solution to a 90-year-old mathematical unsolved problem in just 88 hours. In response, 25 past Fields Medalists, including Professor June Huh of Princeton University who won the award in 2022, issued a joint statement.

They pointed out that recent moves by AI companies using the solving of difficult problems as a stage for technological competition are "harmful," stating that "solving problems is merely a tool and a proxy for the fundamental goal of conceptual understanding and insight."

Just three days after the statement was made public, some 6,000 researchers around the world joined in.

In an interview with SBS, Professor Huh warned that mathematics could lose its original purpose amidst such competition.

[June Huh / Professor of Mathematics, Princeton University: (I am concerned that) this kind of progression, which has lost the original purpose of (mathematics) and in some ways proceeds like a game, could become entrenched.]

He also expressed concern that if AI equipped with massive resources solves difficult problems in an instant, students could fall into intellectual defeatism.

[June Huh / Professor of Mathematics, Princeton University: It sinks you into a sense of skepticism, making you wonder if it is even meaningful to start this research now and hope for results 10 years later.]

From January to August, the number of mathematics posts uploaded to preprint server websites surged by over 33% compared to a year ago, reaching approximately 47,000.

While papers are being mass-produced with the utilization of AI, the academic community points out that it remains uncertain whether humans can fully understand and verify all of this content and process.

They argue that if the repetition continues where AI learns AI-generated results that humans have not properly understood, knowledge may increase, but humans' ability to understand and question on their own will weaken.

[June Huh / Professor of Mathematics, Princeton University: I believe that the most important role of a human and a mathematician is to constantly hold curiosity, maintain intellectual inquisitiveness, and create new horizons.]

Critics also point out that to break away from reckless performance-based competition, open-source AI and public support systems that anyone can utilize are necessary so that AI resources are not concentrated in a small number of companies.

(Video by: Park Hyun-chul | Video Editing by: Shin Se-eun | Design by: Lee Ga-jin)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.