{"id":672128,"date":"2026-11-01T22:40:10","date_gmt":"2026-11-01T22:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/672128\/"},"modified":"2026-11-01T22:40:10","modified_gmt":"2026-11-01T22:40:10","slug":"young-mathematicians-are-reconsidering-their-careers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/672128\/","title":{"rendered":"Young Mathematicians Are Reconsidering Their Careers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Frontier AI programs can now do math better than graduate students<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Those students, it turns out, aren’t taking the news well.<\/p>\n

In a paper<\/a> published this week, researchers at MIT found that a vast majority of grad students and postdoctoral scholars they polled see their career prospects rapidly dimming as AI remakes the field.<\/p>\n

Nearly 76% said they are increasingly unlikely to stay in academic math after earning their degrees. 76% said they feel less motivated to do research “as a result of AI developments<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

And in a free-response portion of the survey, grad students laid bare their raw, pent-up feelings about the subject.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most striking is a red-hot frustration with academic leadership, which respondents described as alternatively wayward, useless, meek, silent, and ineffectual.<\/p>\n

“It’d be great if institutes gave guidance instead of platitudes on this subject,” one respondent wrote.<\/p>\n

“We are lacking high-level leadership from across the academic community,” another said.<\/p>\n

For the survey, conducted by three MIT-affiliated math students, the researchers polled 268 early-career mathematicians via a Google Form. Questions were multiple-choice and free response. They all centered on AI’s ever-expanding ability to do work they’ve spent years studying.<\/p>\n

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Notably, the response window closed just after OpenAI released hundreds of solutions<\/a> to long-standing problems on October 6. The authors caveated the survey, saying it represents the vibe at “only a small window of time.”<\/p>\n

“The past couple of months have been exhausting,” the researchers wrote. “We’re being forced to reckon with existential questions about a field we love, all while incredibly uncertain about our own futures.”<\/p>\n

Since OpenAI first really broke onto the mathematics scene in September, when it published solutions to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize question, the AI-generated solutions have only kept coming.<\/p>\n

Mathematicians have described going through stages<\/a> of disbelief, shock, denial, anger, and, for some, acceptance.<\/p>\n

Though some high-level mathematical councils have convened to issue edicts on how AI should be used, it’s not like OpenAI has to listen to them.<\/p>\n

OpenAI and Anthropic have, however, made some concessions to the math community. Both AI giants pledged a combined $15 million to a foundation to support mathematicians, and OpenAI established an “advisory group” to judge its math operation.<\/p>\n

If you ask students, though, the concessions haven’t changed much for them.<\/p>\n

“It is difficult to do research and go to seminars when it feels like none of the individual work will matter much in the future,” one respondent wrote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Frontier AI programs can now do math better than graduate students. Those students, it turns out, aren’t taking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672129,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,320,284705,36324,61,284706,60,284707,18291,1682,33082,2716,270828,27602,8776,137536,5853,80],"class_list":["post-672128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-career","tag-early-career-mathematician","tag-field","tag-ie","tag-individual-work","tag-ireland","tag-long-standing-problem","tag-math","tag-openai","tag-question","tag-researcher","tag-respondent","tag-solution","tag-student","tag-subject","tag-survey","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672128\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}