Sam Altman says mathematicians went from 'we're cooked' to accepting AI within days

Speaking to students at Stanford, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described the math community's reaction to OpenAI's recent flood of AI-generated results as a rapid grieving cycle: disbelief, then fears that the field was over and grad students should switch majors, then anger at OpenAI. By about day five, he said, many mathematicians had concluded that while some kinds of math work are ending, their jobs will shift toward choosing problems, interpreting and verifying results, and explaining proofs. Altman said the same pattern played out more slowly for programmers and consultants, and argued it points to changing jobs rather than a job apocalypse.