Epoch AI’s recent interview with Ken Ono was a fascinating read. Ono, a mathematician at University of Virginia, discussed in greater detail on how AI is transforming mathematical research. It’s a long interview and here are some highlights:

Q: What makes the problem hard for an AI? A: It’s very difficult to predict which problems are the difficult ones.

Q: What have we learned about AI’s ability? A: I don’t think I can ask a question that AI can’t identify with a particular area of mathematics, because it seems like ChatGPT and others just have at their fingertips the accumulation of human knowledge. And it continues to surprise me how quickly that seems to be the case. Three years ago, ChatGPT or all of these large language models would get things wrong that a five year old could get right. And now we’re asking questions that a PhD student at our universities wouldn’t even know where to start to look.

Q: Extending into the future, where do you expect AI to land in math, say, three years? A: When the participants, at the Frontier Math Symposium, see and test out the pro version of ChatGPT that has been provided to us, you can see their eyes light up thinking it is amazing. This could be really, genuinely my copilot. But perhaps the bigger deal will be the realization for the mathematicians that are here and the colleagues, when we all go back to our universities, that AI is really meant to be a copilot. And will it assist our scientific discovery? Absolutely.

Q: Do you use AI in your research? A: … as a theoretical device, the computers help us discover an area of mathematics that I don’t think any of us thought would exist. So that’s a good partner. A good partner is one that is going to give you clues to conjectures that you can then either prove or build a body of work from.

Q: And how much do you expect AI to reshape math research where zero on a scale from 0 to 10, where zero is the level of a pocket calculator and then ten is math researchers are obsolete. A: Well, I don’t think math researchers will ever be obsolete because an AI doesn’t know how to generate good questions. If that happens, well, that would be really a profound moment. … Asking good questions that drive a theory takes skill. And I think we will always need people who can do that. And we don’t have many people who can do that. These are generally very special people.