IA en un minutoNewsBusiness and products
The Simons Foundation, Anthropic and OpenAI commit $15 million to help mathematicians navigate AI
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
In 30 seconds
Anthropic, OpenAI and the Simons Foundation will put up $15 million between funds and resources so mathematicians can adapt to AI. The foundation will award the money, also via an open call, paying for workshops to review results reached with AI and to agree on rules of use. The two companies will add tools and compute for researchers in mathematics and basic science.
On Thursday, October 15, the Simons Foundation, together with Anthropic and OpenAI, announced a set of initiatives to help the mathematics community cope with the fast arrival of artificial intelligence in its discipline.
Between them, the three organizations are pledging $15 million, counting both money and resources. The foundation will be the one administering and granting the funds, partly through an open call for proposals. They will pay for workshops and other initiatives designed so that researchers can check recent results obtained with AI's help, get trained on the new tools and put them to use, exchange their views and agree on shared rules for using AI.
Separately, Anthropic and OpenAI will offer AI tools and computing capacity to researchers backed by the foundation, and not only mathematicians: basic science researchers too.
According to the foundation, the community itself will steer the awards. This is not its first step in the area: it funded the development of Lean, a proof assistant that, in its words, has revolutionized the way mathematicians work and has made AI-assisted proofs possible, and it has organized workshops, lectures and collaborations on the role of AI in mathematics.
"The community should be driving discussions of how these tools are evaluated, adopted and used, not any single company or institution," said its president, David Spergel. The announcement does not say how much each organization is contributing, how large the grants will be or what the timetable for the call is.
Why it matters · analysis and opinion
Proofs obtained with the help of AI already exist, and someone has to decide how they are checked and when they are accepted. This program puts that task in the hands of the mathematics community itself, with a foundation as the go-between, instead of leaving it to whoever builds the tools. The fact that Anthropic and OpenAI are contributing to a single fund they do not control suggests they care about a credibility they cannot earn on their own. It remains to be seen how much each one puts in, how large the grants will be and what the timetable is. For university departments and research groups, the practical step is to keep a close eye on that call and, meanwhile, to write down which part of each piece of work was done by AI.
Official source: Simons Foundation · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
