Mathematician James Maynard has spent a lot of time this past year "soul searching." A professor at the University of Oxford and winner of the prestigious Fields Medal, Maynard told The Verge he's been grappling with the future of his field as the traditionally slow-moving discipline hurries to adapt to AI.

Days before we spoke, OpenAI revealed it had produced the solutions to 10 long-standing mathematics problems, some of which had confounded academics for decades. Like generative AI used to produce text and images or propose ideas in science and medicine, the technology learns patterns and connections from the vast amount of material it' …

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Recently, a man I was rock climbing with told me about how he'd used AI to make a motivational poster for himself, which he'd hung on his bedroom wall: a bear, walking a slackline over a canyon, holding a sign that said, "Do cool shit." I made what I hoped was a polite noise. What reaction was this man looking for? He probably hoped someone, maybe me, would say it was cool or inspiring. It seemed I was not the first person he'd told about this poster. "You know, it's funny," he said to me. "No one ever says anything about it."

I have been thinking about this now for several days. There's a sort of turducken of things that I find off-puttin …

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