As AI marches on math research, scholars ponder the future

On July 20, mathematician Levent Alpöge, who works at the artificial intelligence company (AI) Anthropic, dropped a casual tweet on X. He claimed the company’s advanced large language model Claude Fable 5 had produced a counterexample to an 87-year-old open problem in algebraic geometry called the Jacobian conjecture. By working on it during the FIFA World Cup final, AI had helped disprove a conjecture that many mathematicians had been working on for decades — and the world got the news about it in a short social media post.