‘I’m Really Terrified’: A Mathematician Grapples With AI’s Recent Breakthroughs

OpenAI announced that tens of thousands of AI agents solved a 90-year-old math problem with a $1 million prize, building on a strategy by Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa, though the result still awaits independent verification amid disputes over credit. Anthropic reported Claude proving 29,500 small theorems and formalizing Fermat’s Last Theorem, while mathematicians like Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend describe AI’s rapid breakthroughs as both transformative and threatening to traditional research careers.