Scary stuff from one of the winners: "A Taxonomy of Omnicidal Futures Involving Artificial Intelligence" (Jacob Tsimerman, Andrew Critch) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09369
This would work better as a lesswrong post
Fields Medals 2026
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Re: Fields Medals 2026
#92Hong Wang was the outlier among the four winners. She was not a traditional mathematical genius. She never participated in any mathematics competitions. Her major when she entered Peking University was not mathematics. During her master's studies in Paris, she even considered changing her major to study architecture.
Re: Fields Medals 2026
#93Scary stuff from one of the winners: "A Taxonomy of Omnicidal Futures Involving Artificial Intelligence" (Jacob Tsimerman, Andrew Critch) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09369
May all world-class mathematicians take a look at the AI alignment problem such that humanity can have a better chance of passing through, and may some of them decide to not focus just on sexy parts like coming up with ways to kill us all, and may those who do so anyway at least come up with more interesting or plausible stories than the ones presented in this paper.
Re: Fields Medals 2026
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience talking with high level mathematicians is that they tend to know their subjects so well and are so excited to share it that they can and will scale their explanation to match their audience.
I mean, they likely have practice! Dating or maybe a significant other, parents, siblings, any BBQ event IE any social event outside academia where someone asks "So what do you do?"
Not to forget mathematicians from other fields. They might be equally unfamiliar with most of our research topics.
Yes we do have plenty of practice adjusting our explanations to the audience.
Re: Fields Medals 2026
#95IMU: We've awarded Fields medals to these outstanding mathematicians.
Hackernews: Next time it'll all be LLMs. AI's going to kill us all, though, one of the mathematicians said so! Maths is useless anyway, what a bunch of nerds. Ooh, one of them likes lesbian fanfic.
Re: Fields Medals 2026
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it's not the same thing. I went through this conversation between Terry Tao and ChatGPT about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample [0] and it looks a lot more like a conversation between peers than him using a tool. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010345
Well, how many humans do you think are able to prompt this to the LLM? "The homogeneity in x is an intertwining between a dilation (x,r,u) to (lambda x, r,u) and a dilation (P,Q,R) to (lambda^-2 P, lambda^-1 Q, lambda R) which seems to collapse the 3d jacobian to a sort of twisted 2d jacobian. Is there a general theory of such twisted jacobians and do you have any sense why those particular dilation weights were used…
There was an article on Rudi Mandl who pestered Einstein into working on gravitational lensing.
This happened because Rudi was persistent and Einstein was kind enough.
In future, citizen scientists have a chance to work on their ideas using AI, eventhough they don't have the deep domain skills. Of course, an expert would still need to review it as usual. But it is a useful tool to democratize science further.
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/amateur-who-helped-...
Re: Fields Medals 2026
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this a purely hypothetical question? Or are you saying that’s what happened in this case. Because that’s not the way I understand it.
It's not, it's basically something that happened. One unsolved problem was solved with the only human input being telling LLM to work harder and to actually solve it after few failed attempts.
Transcript, four prompts:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a60b2eb-0b64-83ee-9c76-7931ca1de0...
Re: Fields Medals 2026
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this supposed to imply that it's accessible?
Yes - as in you have thousands, if not tens of thousands of folks around the world who can understand the general ideas of what was worked on.
If 0.0000125% of the population understands "the general ideas" I wouldn't call it accessible.
Re: Fields Medals 2026
#99Yu Deng is more famous now in china because he loves Lesbian fan fiction.
Can you elaborate? I don't know much about Yu Deng or lesbian fanfiction, but it's not a crossover I would have expected.
Re: Fields Medals 2026
#1004 winners, 3 can speak Chinese.