Fields Medalist Villani, June LLM skeptic, says OpenAI's math result left him shaken
zetalyrae · x · 2026-09-21
Miles Brundage reposted a quote capture of Fields Medalist Cédric Villani's dramatic about-face: in June 2026 Villani claimed "LLMs are not intelligent and understand nothing of what they say," but on September 19 he wrote that he was "shaken by OpenAI's solution to the millennium problem," describing an "atmosphere of the end of history" and "a cataclysm unlike anything mathematics has ever known." The post highlights how frontier model progress in pure mathematics is shaking even elite skeptics; the specific problem OpenAI solved isn't named in the quoted text.
More from AGI Musings
- Anthropic Reveals Claude Now Leads 26% of Its R&D Tasks, Up From Under 1% in February — FinanceYF5 · 2026-09-21
- ctjlewis: Alignment Offers No Guarantees and Economics Makes Stopping SI Impossible — ctjlewis · 2026-09-21
- AI Backlash Runs Deeper: Tech Industry Burned Its Social License for Years — clarejtbirch · 2026-09-21
- François Fleuret's alien joke: after 3.8B years, carbon-based design is about to switch — francoisfleuret · 2026-09-21
- Cheap human-level intelligence could build a Dyson sphere in a decade — EigenGender · 2026-09-21
- "Let em rip": X users debate how far current models are from real danger — tszzl · 2026-09-21