Peter Thiel Says AI is Bad News for People with Maths Skills, Not Writers

Recently on the Conversations with Tyler podcast, Peter Thiel, the former CEO of PayPal said, “People have told me that they think within the next 3-5 years, AI models would be able to solve all the US maths olympiad problems,” highlighting that the future is worse for people in maths than words.

“The Silicon Valley in the 21st century is way too biassed towards the maths people,” Thiel added, saying that the exact reason for this is not clear. “But that’s the thing that seems deeply unstable and that’s what I would bet on getting worse,” he added. 

Maths ability has become the test for everything. Thiel said that people who have to go to medical school have to study maths and calculus and people are weeded out through their proficiency in it. “I am not sure that it’s really correlated with your dexterity in neurosurgery,” he added. “I don’t want someone operating on my brain to be doing prime number factorisation in their head.”

Thiel also said that this is similar to the bias he had for rating people on the basis of their chess skills. But this was later removed in 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue was able to beat the chess champion Garry Kasparov. “Isn’t that what’s going to happen to maths and isn’t that a long overdue rebalance of our society,” he added. 

Similarly, during an episode of the Logan Bartlett Show, Altman recalled how calculators were perceived in his maths classes. “We never got to use calculators,” he said, adding that you had to be proficient with calculators in real-life to excel later.

The importance of learning maths has been emphasised from our school days. It’s a crucial requirement in order to excel as an engineer. Further, with computer science becoming so mainstream, society has started to separate those who are good at maths from those who are not.

Now AI is bringing down this wall for the better. With the advent of tools such as ChatGPT and Copilot, everyone is increasingly becoming a developer without needing to learn maths, democratising access to fields that once required deep knowledge of the subject.

But funnily enough, AI is not yet good at maths, though its capabilities are increasing. Recently, ChatGPT with the Wolfram plug-in scored a 96% in the UK A-level paper for maths, which is an essential qualification to get into the AI field. 

What this tells us is that if AI is able to crack an exam that is meant to get into AI, there needs to be a major change in the educational systems across the world to adjust to the shifting paradigm of mathematical teaching.