When AI takes away the thrill of discovery

“Pure math is being devastated or revolutionized, depending on your point of view.” So said Cornell professor Steven Strogatz after the artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI announced in early September a potential solution to the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize problems that represent the highest goals for mathematical proofs. OpenAI’s solution involved unleashing an army of AI agents at a cost of millions of dollars in computing power, and it also certainly drew on decades of human effort in mathematics before it. Then a few weeks later, OpenAI posted 722 manuscripts describing progress on 372 mathematical problem families, and Google DeepMind published (in Science ) solutions from their own AI math system. These events are potentially exciting for those who long to know the answers to these problems as soon as possible, but they have also sent the world of mathematics reeling, and pose an even bigger question for all fields: Can the satisfaction of understanding ever replace the thrill of discovery?