“This assumes that just knowing the answer to the test is enough. And if you give us the answer to the test, you have given us everything that is required. And they keep just being like, no, that's actually not what this is.”
The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
David Pierce summing up the mathematicians' objection to AI labs dumping solved problems on the field: most of the value of research is in how you reach the answer. Without that, he asked, what does the next problem even look like?
Transcript
…maybe, if it turns out to be true. And all of that other bit is kind of missed as well. And that's, I think, where it's kind of annoying because they've said this most recent drop of sort of 400-odd results. I've been told would take years at least to sort through. Wow. Just on a basic level.
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…ways, which is there's a thread in a lot of your stories that is people being like, again, look, even if they solved this, even if the thing arrived at the right answer, most of the value of doing this research is in figuring out how to arrive at the right answer, right? We learn new tools, we learn new systems, we learn new methods, and it is the work that then gets us to the next thing. And this assumes that just knowing the answer to the test is enough. And if you give us the answer to the test, you have given us everything that is required. And they keep just being like, no, that's actually not what this is. Because now what's going to happen is there is no next problem for this AI system to be pointed at because we don't know how we got to the answer to this one. And like, are we now betting on the next open AI model to be able to creatively imagine new kinds of problems, which I think is sort of a leap beyond anything that has been able to happen before? But there's this real sense of people being…
Yeah, I mean, I think that's almost at the heart of the problem here: you have one side who are like, haven't we done a great thing? And it is great.
We answered your question. Yeah.
But it's almost like, but that wasn't what we were trying to do. That wasn't all of what we were trying to do. And you've kind of like made the rest of it worse, maybe on the way. That's the thing you can't even tell because it's so like some of the papers, I mean, three of those papers that they…
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