Congrats to the winners! I’m not sure how accurate this prediction is, but 2026 may be the last time pure humans win the Fields Medal. By 2030, AI could be a coauthor on many winning results. With recent news about LLMs solving major conjectures, winning IMO gold medals, and so much rapid progress, a lot is happening.

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pmontra 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fields medals are for humans. We can create an award for AIs for the same reason for humans and machines don't compete against each other in sports. Machines are usually faster and stronger.

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Laurel1234 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Clankers aren't people. Should we be handing out Fields medals to LateX, python and calculators?

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MattCruikshank 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We know which bots are the best at Chess. You'd care which AI is the most accurate at diagnosing your medical condition. It's not a bad thing to keep track of which automated systems are the best at certain tasks.

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kylecazar 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do humans win Fields medals for formatting and calculation?

	▲	Laurel1234 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Python does all kinds of wondrous things

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tocs3 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Should we be handing out Fields medal to

I don't know, maybe. I would not put Clankers on the same level (or category / level of importance) as people but if they produce the work maybe they should get the credit.

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magicalist 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> but if they produce the work maybe they should get the credit

But that's not what the Fields Medal is for.

If you're a 41 year old mathematician and do amazing groundbreaking world shifting math, you can't get a Fields Medal either.

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hooloovoo_zoo 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Tool-assisted proofs typically already get a description of the tool usage. Even if one wanted to start giving authorship credit to llms, they’re too non-atomic (did it have web search, which mcp?, etc.)

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tocs3 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Not trying to delving into a deep philosophical question here but...

I asked chatgpt to write a poem about my mothers dog a while back. It spit out a poem that my mother likes and keeps around. When asked, I say chatgpt wrote it. If I asked chatgpt for a proof of the Goldbach Conjecture and it spit out a verifiable proof, I think I would go ahead and give chatgpt credit. Not that I think it is likely. It would be more of some ability (like a robot end effector is able to hold an egg) and monkeys at typewriters.

Maybe not Fields Medal worthy, but worthy of some credit.

	▲	hooloovoo_zoo 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Anything morality-related is going to be subjective, but I think there are just too many practical problems with LLMs as coauthors. For me, in a scientific context 'chatgpt' is too vague, and I think it would be logically inconsistent to have LLMs as coauthors and not other forms of Monte Carlo. I also think LLMs are just too mechanical to be ascribed 'people words' (in the same way I don't consider my automated coffee machine a barista).

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num42 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't remember the details exactly. I think earlier this year someone listed an LLM as a coauthor on a paper, maybe in physics or maybe another field. I remember reading about it on Reddit, but I'm not sure when or which paper it was. If anyone remembers what I'm referring to, please let me know.

	▲	BeetleB 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I think earlier this year someone listed an LLM as a coauthor on a paper This is not as radical as it sounds. People did stuff like that all the time pre-LLM. It's just a question of how fussy the journal's editor is. See https://www.wired.com/2013/03/computers-and-math/ for examples in math. HN discussion on that article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5322313

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netvarun 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I posted a similar comment when the winners were leaked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48906573

i’d like to revise my earlier comment: 2022 may have been the last time we had pure humans win a Fields Medal.

I’m fairly certain this batch's winners used LLMs for research, lit-revews, reviewing work, and calculations... perhaps not enough to count as a co-author, but still enough to handle a lot of the grunt work.

Who would have imagined the pace of progress in LLM-powered math..

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anvuong 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's like saying:

- winners in the 30s were the last time we have pure human to win (before computer)

- winners in the 70s were the last time we have pure human to win (before internet)

- winners in the 90s were the last time we have pure human to win (before search engine)

Why can't we treat LLMs as just another tool like computers, search engines, computing libraries? Why do people keep trying to anthropomorphizing these binaries?

People in the 1800s used to win awards and acclamation by simply hand-cranking numbers for popular calculations (Pi, error functions, etc.) and printing them in a book. This will just be the same thing.

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falcor84 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But it's not the same thing. I went through this conversation between Terry Tao and ChatGPT about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample [0] and it looks a lot more like a conversation between peers than him using a tool.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010345

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applfanboysbgon 3 hours ago | parent [-]

"Looks like" being the operative keyword there. Do you feel like you're having a conversation with a peer when you prompt an LLM in the topic you're an expert of? For the love of God, I'd hope not. The whole point is that, even though these things are really good at generating what looks like human output, they are still just regular software algorithms.

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falcor84 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Do you feel like you're having a conversation with a peer when you prompt an LLM in the topic you're an expert of? For the love of God, I'd hope not.

Yes, I do feel that. Make of it what you will.

	▲	applfanboysbgon 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The only thing I can think is ... how? If I were to anthromorphize my experience with frontier models, it would be as a mentally challenged child with complete memorization of an encyclopedia and thesaurus. It has the ability to rapidly experiment and potentially succeed at tasks through trial-and-error, but not without constantly corralling it in the correct direction because it would stick a fork in an outlet if unattended for five minutes. Tao's chat certainly doesn't give me a vibe of talking with a peer. Do you much often have conversations with colleagues where you write one sentence and then get five pages dumped on you, repeating ad infinitum? LLMs can be useful for rubber ducking, and sometimes the plausibly-related word-soup it generates so quickly will help your thinking along faster, but that's not the same thing as a genuine conversation. And it mostly looked like Tao was using it as an advanced calculator, firing off his own ideas for it to quickly do calculations on. I don't know why we need to anthromorphize these tools just because they generate sentences.

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azan_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you say "find some unsolved graph theory problem and counterexample for it" and LLM actually does it, is it really you that solved the problem? That's the difference vs other tools.

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fn-mote 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Is this a purely hypothetical question?

Or are you saying that’s what happened in this case. Because that’s not the way I understand it.

	▲	netvarun 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		https://x.com/Qiaoqiao2001/status/2080003441821163958 While there was a bunch of human effort - it is not that hard to imagine this whole pipeline becoming fully autonomous in the coming months.

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neaden 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What do you base that certainty on? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am also skeptical you are correct and since it is four people you can probably look into if any of them have talked about it instead of just deciding that what you think is true.