Christian Szegedy says AI closes math's lone-climber age

"Mathematics is about to graduate. It will grow into a full-scale industry and become the true infrastructure of all scientific and technological progress." That is where Christian Szegedy lands in a long essay, dated October 3, published on a public Google Doc and circulated by at least two AI researchers we track.

Szegedy's extended metaphor is a jungle. Mathematicians, he writes, roam "an endless, unmapped wilderness: jungles, deserts, jagged mountains, rivers wide enough to swallow a village," and the discipline rewards those who "climb a tall mountain through great effort and hardship and sketch a rough map from the summit." That culture, in his telling, produced a plea he puts in explorers' mouths: "Please don't put flags on our rocks. It stops other explorers from trying to climb them."

He puts the opposing camp bluntly. "The skeptics who say AI can't conjecture, can't theorize, and can't explain are describing last spring's models," he writes. In his framing the new tools "have reached the range and reliability to fly into the Darién Gap without crashing," and will keep improving.

The consequence, in his words: "The age of lone climbers is closing, and the age of mapping the whole continent is opening." "Naturally, climbing rocks just to hone climbing tools will lose its point." Instead, "other skills will matter more: choosing which terrain is worth exploring, steering fleets of airplanes, and explaining what they find to the rest of the world."

Szegedy names his brother Balázs Szegedy as an early adopter, and cites Jared Duker Lichtman and Michael R. Douglas as mathematicians "very outspoken, working toward the same vision." He does not claim this is yet consensus. "Academia will not change quickly," he concedes. "Universities, journals and tenure committees will look much the same for years."