Cambridge Professor Po-Ling Loh: LLMs Now Make Real Progress on Research-Level Math
dianarycai · x · 2026-09-06
In a guest column for the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Cambridge statistics professor Po-Ling Loh calls on the field to face the LLM era head-on.
Key points
- Three months ago researchers still debated whether ChatGPT could solve research-level math; frontier LLMs now announce substantial theoretical progress across all areas of mathematics weekly.
- Her advice to skeptics: borrow a friend's GPT Pro account and ask a question you're sure AI can't answer.
First-hand experience
- In February, GPT-5.3 helped her prove a lemma: rapidly shrinking the search space and impressively versed in esoteric topics, though prone to silly mistakes (e.g., misjudging a convex function).
- Shortly after GPT-5.5's release in mid-April, she truly grasped AI's power for math research.
Proposed path: from competition to collaboration between statisticians and AI.
Related event: Cambridge Statistics Professor: AI Has 'Pierced' Math Stats Careers(2 posts)→
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