Artificial intelligence can write a poem in the style of Walt Whitman, provide dating advice and suggest the best way to cook an artichoke. But when it comes to mathematics, large language models like OpenAI’s immensely popular ChatGPT have sometimes stumbled over basic problems. Some see this as an inherent limitation of the technology, especially when it comes to complex reasoning.
A new initiative from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency seeks to account for that shortfall by enlisting researchers in finding ways to conduct high-level mathematics research with an AI “co-author.” The goal of the new grant-making program, Exponentiating Mathematics, is to speed up the pace of progress in pure (as opposed to applied) math – and, in doing so, to turn AI into a superlative mathematician.
