Fields Medalist Villani 'shaken' by OpenAI's claimed millennium problem solution
akbirthko · x · 2026-09-19
- French Fields Medalist Cédric Villani said he was 'shaken' after OpenAI announced a claimed solution to a Millennium Prize Problem, calling it 'an atmosphere of end times, a cataclysm like mathematics has never known.'
- The reversal is striking: just last month Villani publicly argued LLMs aren't intelligent, calling them mere statistical machines reducible to functions and citing their failure on a washing machine example.
- The about-face highlights how rapidly expert judgments of frontier model capability are shifting, though the claim itself still awaits verification.
Related event: Fields Medalist Villani Stunned by OpenAI's Millennium Problem Claim(5 posts)→
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