Mathematics could become the next major battleground in the artificial intelligence race. After OpenAI announced that its AI model had solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Challenge, China is preparing to join the competition through an alliance of more than 1,000 mathematicians who will incorporate AI into their research.
Leading Chinese mathematicians launched the initiative in Beijing last Sunday to integrate AI into mathematical research, the South China Morning Post reported. The effort is being spearheaded by Fields Medal winner Shing-Tung Yau. Named the Yau Laboratory Alliance for Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, the initiative will bring together eight prominent institutions and aims to establish a network of over 1,000 scientists.
AI is like a tsunami in mathematics
Yau has presented the alliance as an attempt to narrow what he considers a significant gap between China and the United States in applying AI to cutting-edge scientific research.
“A year ago, I did not think AI was this powerful,” he said. “The development of AI in mathematics is like a tsunami.”
He argued that Chinese mathematicians should embrace and organise around the technology rather than shy away from it. The alliance plans to develop specialised AI models for mathematics, use AI to formulate conjectures and formalise proofs, and create systems whose reasoning processes are easier to understand and interpret.
Yau believes China must catch up with the United States in advanced scientific research, particularly in developing AI systems capable of making progress in mathematics and physics.
He acknowledged that Chinese AI models had performed well on tasks designed for everyday users but said they continued to lag significantly behind leading American systems in frontier research.
“But if you ask them to do the work OpenAI has done over the past month, the gap is very large,” Yau said.
His remarks came days after OpenAI released more than 700 papers presenting findings on 377 mathematical problems. Meanwhile, the Association for Human Mathematics called on mathematicians to boycott OpenAI, arguing that researchers “did not ask for this work to be done.”
OpenAI’s mathematical findings have continued to attract scrutiny. After publishing 722 mathematical manuscripts, the company withdrew three the following day after discovering an error that invalidated an argument and affected two related papers. It also revised 14 other manuscripts.
Some mathematicians criticised the speed and scale of the publication, arguing that mathematical results require thorough verification, transparent explanations and proper recognition of earlier work.
Meta has also previously published papers detailing how its AI systems helped solve six major mathematical problems.
