Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
A viral post about AI conquering mathematics has now pulled Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu into the conversation. Responding to a post by Will Bryk, CEO of Exa AI Labs, who argued that AI could soon surpass every human at math, Vembu extended the argument into an area much closer to home for millions of people: programming.
Bryk’s original post made the case that mathematics isn’t inherently “hard” in a computational sense, it’s just that humans never evolved to be naturally good at manipulating abstract symbols. He argued that even a legendary mathematician like Terrence Tao is only a few standard deviations better than an average skilled human, but for an AI, closing that same gap is just a matter of scaling up context windows, reinforcement learning runs, and test-time computation. “By 2027 we’ll be cranking out mathematical beauties each morning like Alan Turing cranking out Enigma codes before breakfast,” Bryk wrote.
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Vembu draws the line from math to code
Vembu agreed with a large chunk of that reasoning but pushed the discussion further, straight into software engineering. “The part of mathematics that is like playing Chess or Go, coming up with ever cleverer moves, will be conquered by AI. That is now evident,” he wrote. But he drew a distinction for the rarer, more creative side of math, comparing it to inventing an entirely new game that humans would actually find interesting, something he called far harder and something humans themselves do very rarely too.
Where things get uncomfortable is Vembu’s take on where coding fits into all of this. “It increasingly seems to me that a very large fraction of software code could be produced competently and correctly by AI,” he wrote, pointing out that formal proof systems like Lean, already used to verify mathematical theorems, could soon be adapted to verify AI-written code as well, addressing the “correctly” part of that equation.
The question isn’t if AI helps, it is how many humans are still needed
Vembu was careful to clarify that he isn’t predicting a future where AI does everything on its own. Humans will still be part of the process, he wrote, but the real question worth sitting with is a much more sobering one: how many humans will actually be needed going forward. “The key question is ‘how many humans are needed’ and the answer right now is sobering and unsettling,” he wrote.
He ended his post with a rare moment of personal reflection for a tech CEO, admitting the pressure this creates for people in his own industry. “All of us in software need to figure out how to stay relevant. Let me get back to work. Please wish us luck,” Vembu wrote, a fairly candid admission from someone who runs one of India’s biggest software companies, and a signal that even industry leaders aren’t entirely sure how this story ends.
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
