An open letter from the world’s leading mathematicians, including a Fields Medal winner, raises one of the most pressing questions of modern times—the fundamental gap between the goals of artificial intelligence’s creators and those of the scientific community. While tech companies view solving complex mathematical problems as a pure demonstration benchmark, to scientists, the problems themselves are just an aid to achieving what matters most: deep conceptual understanding.
The manifesto’s authors warn that the pursuit of speed and mass production of “right answers” is destroying the traditional scientific ecosystem. For decades, the most important humanities processes have been shaped within it: mentoring, long-term reflection on ideas, testing evidence through discussion, and transferring knowledge to new generations of students. Developer rush can lead to plagiarism, devaluation of human work, and broken chains of continuity as machines produce results without the researchers behind them having a living idea.
