Episode 17 - What happens now that AI is good at math? – OpenAI Podcast

Andrew

Hello, I'm Andrew Main, and this is the OpenAI podcast. Today, our guests are researchers Sebastian Bubeck and Ernest Rieux, and we're going to talk about math, how it went from almost laughable to Olympiad level and why you need math to reach AGI. The progress of the

Sebastian

last few years has been nothing short of miraculous.

Ernest

We will be able to have LLMs be able to solve problems that require more than 50 pages of thinking. Mathematics was just the

Sebastian

perfect benchmark to see the model making progress during the last four years.

Andrew

Sebastian, Ernest, I'd love to know more about you. So how would you explain your roles?

Sebastian

Yeah, sure. So I have been working in mathematics for almost twenty years now. I used to work in optimization and series of machine learning. I was a professor at Princeton for a few years before moving to Microsoft, and now I'm a researcher at OpenAI. And in the last few years, I've been really trying to understand how AI can help mathematics and to really evaluate the progress that we're making in terms of solving difficult math problems with AI.

Andrew

Ernest, how about you?

Ernest

Yeah. So I recently joined OpenAI as a researcher, but before that, I was an applied mathematician working on optimization and machine learning theory. And in my previous job, I worked as a professor of mathematics at the UCLA Math Department.

Andrew

So I think a lot of people have this perception that these models aren't good at math, literally called language models. And how has that changed? What's gone on?

Episode 17 - What happens now that AI is good at math?

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