Gil Kalai: ‘Be a Grothendieck!’, on AI and mathematics

Posted Sept 22, 2026 on ‘Combinatorics and more’. Summary from an automated reading: Kalai calls AI in mathematics ‘a major event in our lives, perhaps a crisis, perhaps an opportunity, and probably both’ and writes ‘I don’t recommend any attempt to “slow down” or stop progress in AI-assisted mathematics’. He stresses AI’s use for simplifying proofs and generating problems and conjectures, and asks for open debate and tolerance of differing views. He mentions Chen and Klartag’s ‘Digesting the proof of the sharp thin-shell inequality’ (arXiv 2607.23307), Alexandre Eremenko’s MathOverflow report that several of his open problems were solved with AI in August 2026, Alex Kontorovich’s ICM 2026 plenary and the Advisory Group on Mathematics and AI (agmai.org). Quotes were extracted by a summarising tool and should be re-checked against the page.