The Math Superstar Who’s Terrified of AI—and Just Took a Job at OpenAI
When he won the Fields Medal last week, Jacob Tsimerman accepted the most prestigious honor in math wearing a powder-blue tuxedo with satin lapels.
Then he made an announcement as striking as his tux.
After the ceremony, the four winning mathematicians were asked what they planned to do next. One said he would keep working on partial differential equations, one said he wanted to experiment with artificial intelligence and one said she had absolutely no idea. That left Tsimerman.
“I’ll be starting a position at OpenAI,” he said.
The decision was both shocking and not at all surprising. This is someone who recently wrote a paper categorizing the ways AI might kill everyone, applying a mathematician’s instinct for order to the apocalypse. He stopped taking graduate students who weren’t engaging with AI because he couldn’t be sure about the future of math. He even shifted his focus away from number theory and complex algebraic geometry.
It turns out he’s so worried about the dangers of AI that he’s now pivoting to work on AI safety.
The star professor is taking a leave from the University of Toronto to become a researcher at OpenAI, but Tsimerman is not leaving math.
