I think in three years AI will become useful for mathematicians. It will be a great co-pilot. You’re trying to prove a theorem, and there’s one step that you think is true, but you can’t quite see how it’s true. And you can say, “AI, can you do this stuff for me?” And it may say, “I think I can prove this.” I don’t think mathematics will become solved. If there was another major breakthrough in AI, it’s possible, but I would say that in three years you will see notable progress, and it will become more and more manageable to actually use AI. And even if AI can do the type of mathematics we do now, it means that we will just move to a to a higher type of mathematics. So right now, for example, we prove things one at a time. It’s like individual craftsmen making a wooden doll or something. You take one doll and you very carefully paint everything, and so forth, and then you take another one. The way we do mathematics hasn’t changed that much. But in every other type of discipline, we have mass production. And so with AI, we can start proving hundreds of theorems or thousands of theorems at a time. And human mathematicians will direct the AIs to do various things. So I think the way we do mathematics will change, but their time frame is maybe a little bit aggressive.
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I think there’ll be different ways of doing mathematics that just don’t exist right now. I can see project manager mathematicians who can organize very complicated projects—they don’t understand all the mathematics, but they can break things up into smaller pieces and delegate them to other people, and they have good people skills. Then there are specialists who work in subfields. There are people who are good at trying to train AI on specific types of mathematics, and then there are people who can convert the AI proofs into something human-readable. It will become much more like the way almost any other modern industry works. Like, in journalism, not everyone has the same set of skills. You have editors, you have journalists, and you have businesspeople, and so forth—we’ll have similar things in mathematics eventually.