“Holy crap, first programmers got their jobs snatched by AI, and now mathematicians’ careers are being wiped out overnight by OpenAI Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematics professor at NYU, was visibly emotional during an interview: ‘This batch of papers has destroyed the careers of young mathematicians. I’ve even heard that at least three researchers had their entire research plans derailed.’ You might not understand just how brutal this is. A math PhD might spend three to five years solving a single problem. Their dissertation, research funding, and future faculty positions all hinge on this research direction. Then, after one night’s sleep, OpenAI uploads a batch of related proofs. Even if they still need verification, the original work you painstakingly prepared for publication might have already lost its most critical element—novelty. Someone spends years burning the midnight oil, and AI churns out results in one night. Who can handle that? At the same time, Buckmaster also exposed another very serious issue: Do you think your research ideas are safe just because you didn’t use AI? Mathematicians applying for research funding need to submit unpublished research proposals in advance. But reviewers might just feed these proposals into large models to generate summaries. The math community’s reaction has been intense. Researchers from institutions like Cambridge and NYU have criticized the quality of these papers, saying they’re inconsistent, with some proofs being hard to understand and requiring significant manpower for independent verification. Three of the papers have already been retracted due to notation errors. The Association for Human Mathematics (AHM) has gone as far as to publicly oppose this, calling the release of over 700 documents at once a ‘display of power.’ Even Fields Medalist Terence Tao’s blog has reposted this statement of opposition. Programmers worry about AI taking their jobs, but mathematicians are now realizing that AI might finish the research they need to apply for jobs before they even get hired.”