Can AI quicken the pace of math discovery?

Artificial intelligence can write a poem in the style of Walt Whitman, provide dating advice and suggest the best way to cook an artichoke. But when it comes to mathematics, large language models like OpenAI’s immensely popular ChatGPT have sometimes stumbled over basic problems. Some see this as an inherent limitation of the technology, especially when it comes to complex reasoning.

A new initiative from the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency seeks to account for that shortfall by enlisting researchers in finding ways to conduct high-level…