Mathematicians Are The Canary Down The AI Coal Mine

Hannah Fry (0:01)

Welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.

Michael Stevens (0:03)

And I'm Michael Stevens.

Hannah Fry (0:04)

I'm really excited.

Michael Stevens (0:05)

Why? What are you excited about?

Hannah Fry (0:08)

We're going to do fluid dynamics, but properly, properly for real. Because I don't know if you've heard about this, Michael, but there's been some very, very, very big news in the fluid dynamics world.

Michael Stevens (0:20)

Believe it or not, I have not heard about this news.

Hannah Fry (0:23)

Have you not?

Michael Stevens (0:25)

No, no, I don't know.

Hannah Fry (0:25)

I've had people stopping me in the street about this news.

Michael Stevens (0:28)

Shoot, I've just been down the rabbit hole of making shorts. I haven't gotten my head out to learn about fluid dynamics news. But I'm excited that I get to hear it from you.

Hannah Fry (0:39)

Well, you do. Okay, so I'll tell you the news first, for those of you who haven't come across it. OpenAI announced that they have a proof to a very famous problem called the Navier-Stokes problem. They used AI, they got it over the line. This is a problem that is so famous that in the year 2000, the Clay Maths Institute said they would give a million dollars to anybody who managed to come up with a proof for it.

It turns out the first thing to get there wasn't a mathematician, wasn't a human, it was a swarm of AI agents. And believe me, that has ruffled some feathers.

Michael Stevens (1:26)

Yeah.

Okay. Wow. So I did not know about this. I'm also not familiar with the problem. I bet back in 2000, if I had known, I probably would have already solved it to be honest.

SPEAKER_3 (1:38)

But you know.

Hannah Fry (1:39)

That's the only reason why you're not sitting on the million bucks.

SPEAKER_3 (1:42)

I think that's the other new reason.

Michael Stevens (1:45)

I hope you can tell us about the problem.

Hannah Fry (1:46)

Oh, you betcha.

Michael Stevens (1:47)

And then I'm also fascinated by AI solved a problem. Because I am the least informed about AI person I know. And so this might sound really naive, but I hadn't heard of AI solving a lot of problems.

I know that they can do things like figure out how proteins fold. But I hadn't heard a lot of stories about things like, oh, they figured out this long-standing math problem. They solved it. There's a lot of like they can regurgitate back what humans have already said. And they can change its format. But to come up with a new solution I hadn't heard a lot about. Hey, it read all the medical literature and it's cured 18 diseases. I haven't heard that. But this is a solution to a problem.

Hannah Fry (2:31)

This is new. This is the AI has managed to do something that humans have tried to do and failed at doing for many, many decades.

Michael Stevens (2:40)

By the way, in the comments below, if you're aware of problems AI has solved that I'm not, which is probably a bunch, leave them in the comments because I'm not saying I'm just showing off my lack of knowledge. But let's talk about Navier Stokes.

Hannah Fry (2:59)

This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

Michael Stevens (3:02)

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Hannah Fry (3:13)

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Michael Stevens (3:22)

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Hannah Fry (3:28)

But thanks to research, cancer treatment has advanced a lot. And Cancer Research UK is driving further innovations like cancer sniffing robots and drugs made from gut bugs that could change the future of medicine.

Michael Stevens (3:41)

Over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK's work has helped double cancer survival in the UK. And today it's continuing to save and improve lives around the world.

Hannah Fry (3:51)

For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/rest Is Science.

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