🔮 Exponential View #575: AI’s math breakthrough and its creative limits

“Humans were not put on this earth to maintain Excel models.”

This post originally appeared in Exponential View.

“Scientific specialization has produced vast intellectual silos. AI systems may prove unusually powerful at finding the intellectual wormholes between them.”

The backlash is worsening

American college graduates are angry. In my Saturday column, I write:

The narrative around AI has been about promises for tomorrow, but sacrifices today. […] Engaging with this resistance won’t be effective if AI leaders throw distant fantasies at people dealing with muddy water coming from their kitchen tap today.

👀 The AI backlash is the only thing growing faster than AI revenues

AI’s creative expression

An OpenAI reasoning model solved an 80-year-old open problem in discrete geometry. The interesting point here is that the reasoning model found an unexpected bridge between two different fields of math. Discrete geometry and algebraic number theory are meaningfully separate cultures. An expert in one field might know something about the other, but not at the depth required for breakthrough research.