00:00We've known for a long time that machines can beat humans at chess.
00:04AI has even crushed the grandmasters at the much more complicated and ancient game of Go,
00:09and now we're being told that AI is coming for mathematics.
00:13We're reading headlines like, AI solves 100-year-old maths problem.
00:17Sounds impressive, right? But what's the truth behind the headlines?
00:21I'm a professor of maths at the University of Bath in the UK,
00:25and I've been talking to my colleagues about where we currently are with maths and AI and what the future
00:31looks like.
00:32Here's what I found out. AI can now solve international mathematical Olympiad problems.
00:37That's a tournament to which only the best and brightest high school mathematics students are invited.
00:43It sounds pretty impressive, right? But is it anywhere near research-level mathematics?
00:48In fact, that's a whole different game.
00:49But AI has helped to spot deep connections in mathematical fields like topology,
00:55mathematical connections that probably human mathematicians might not have spotted on their own.
01:00But the AI can't prove its own theorems yet, not research-level theorems.
01:05There are just too many steps, and the AI just isn't precise enough yet.
01:09So at the moment, the humans are doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
01:13The real change that many of my mathematician colleagues foresee isn't that they're going to be replaced wholesale by AI,
01:20but more that AI is going to become a helpful collaborator.
01:24AI is already helping to open doors into areas that mathematicians might never have explored alone,
01:29generating new ideas and building new connections.
01:32But it isn't yet the all-singing, all-dancing mathematician replacement that the tech companies might have us believe.
01:39Not yet, anyway.
01:40So is AI all hype, or is it a genuine revolution?
01:45Let us know what you think in the comments, and check out livescience.com for more.
