Announcements over recent months that artificial intelligence models have cracked previously unsolvable problems are shaking top-level mathematicians to the core, and they are now asking themselves: Where do we come in?

“All the avenues of research I had are now gone; we’re facing a new day,” Hugo Duminil-Copin, winner of the 2022 Fields Medal, one of the highest honors in mathematics, recently told his colleagues at the French Mathematical Society.

Since April, AI firms have regularly been publishing solutions to previously unsolved mathematical problems as they seek to demonstrate the power of their latest models.