Today, take a tour of the A.I. breakthroughs, debates and worries that captured headlines this week. We hear from a mathematician who wondered if OpenAI had solved a math problem with his research and consider how nervous we should be about A.I. destroying humanity. A.I. cracked one of the great unsolved math problems
OpenAI said on Tuesday that its newest artificial intelligence technology had solved one of the “Millennium Problems,” a collection of important unanswered math questions meant to push the world’s leading mathematicians to new heights. The announcement is another clear sign that A.I. is fundamentally changing the upper reaches of mathematics, which have long been viewed as a pinnacle of human achievement. The change has excited some mathematicians, while stirring concern among others. “This is a spectacular culmination of the arc we have seen over the past 12 months,” the OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck said of the company’s new solution for what mathematicians call “the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem.” Your questions, answeredWhat is Navier-Stokes?It looks at a series of mathematical equations that describe the movement of liquids, like water, and gases, like air. These equations are often used to predict the weather. They can also be used to model the behavior of ocean currents or the climate as a whole. But mathematicians have struggled to understand parts of these equations. The Navier-Stokes problem essentially asks if these equations become unreliable in certain situations; if there are cases where they can no longer be solved. This would imply, theoretically, that the laws of physics would break down under certain extreme conditions — that, for example, water could be made to spontaneously explode. Do you have a question you’d like the Science desk to answer? Send it to sciencenewsletter@nytimes.com Mathematician clashes with OpenAI
Tristan Buckmaster, an N.Y.U. mathematician, was on the path toward an important proof when one of the A.I. giants used its staggering resources to get there first. Dr. Buckmaster said he did not care about the $1 million prize or even winning the race to come up with the answer. “I love math, and I just wanted to be part of the story,” he said during a two-hour recounting of the events in his office on Tuesday afternoon. Could A.I. end humanity?
Deep existential anxieties made global headlines this week when an Anthropic researcher quit the industry, citing fears that his lab and others like it were building supersmart machines that humans would be unable to control. The potential threats posed by A.I. are understandably scary. But the modern world teems with a multitude of existential risks. Humans also face the prospect of doom from killer asteroids, pandemics, thermonuclear war, climate change, giant blobs of incandescent material shot from the sun, ecological collapse and the onset of a sudden ice age. The problem, scientists and public policy experts say, is not so much these threats, of which A.I. is merely the latest, but the innate human difficulty of putting them into perspective. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
One more thingTEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE One more quick check on that math problem. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.) The Navier-Stokes equation is complicated. In simple terms, what does it describe? The movement of liquids and gases. The mathematics of fire combustion. The transformation of potential energy to kinetic energy. Thanks for joining us this week! Let us know how we’re doing at sciencenewsletter@nytimes.com.
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