What Peter Woit thinks about AI agents
Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
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4 dated positions, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Peter Woit has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsThe new AI agents have profound implications for mathematics research and I think the math community needs to start discussing specific ways to deal with these.
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Their wordsthe math community needs to adopt a version of the ethical standards of experimental science. If you are using AI agents, you can't just give a proof (formalized or not), but need to also provide a detailed explanation of how these agents were used to get the result.
- 6 weeks earlier
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Their wordsSo far I haven't seen AI agents doing anything new and important that I would care about, but maybe that's just a matter of time...
↗Requiem for a Field?math.columbia.edu 1st of 3 in this piece
- 11 days earlier
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Their wordsWhile in mathematics AI agents are starting to have a major positive impact on research (e.g. by resolving the Jacobian conjecture), the situation is very different in hep-th.