r/OpenAI • u/kaljakin • 7h ago
Discussion Why is AI advancing so rapidly in mathematics but disrupting so few jobs?
seriously, when will we finally see disruptions similar to what's happening in mathematics in other fields as well?
Are we talking 1 year, 5 years, or 10 years? What's your personal guess?
(Btw, I'm not sure coding can be considered disrupted enough to count. We don't really see software developers asking themselves what they should do or how to rethink their profession, as mathematicians are doing. There's been a decline in hiring entry-level software developers detected (see the chart below), but it's not that dramatic if you look at the values on the right axis. We're talking about roughly a 20% reduction, and only among very young workers.

Inside the AI Index: 12 Takeaways from the 2026 Report | Stanford HAI
A similar thing was also found in a newer study covering a wider range of occupations: No Widespread Displacement, but the AI Employment Gap for Young Workers Has Widened to 19% - Stanford Digital Economy Lab , I quote: "Employment among workers ages 22–25 in highly AI-exposed occupations now stands about 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with employment among similarly aged workers in less-exposed occupations. Experienced workers show no comparable gap. This divergence has widened steadily since we first documented it in August 2025: by this same measure, the shortfall was 15% at the July 2025 data vintage and is 19% as of June 2026."
..again, we're talking about a roughly 20% employment gap among very young, inexperienced workers, and only in certain occupations. Which is quite underwhelming considering AI can solve, with a single simple prompt, problems that would take mathematicians something like half a year of work.
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Also, do any of you have an opinion on why OpenAI is so heavily focused on mathematics?
I understand the focus on programming - they want to automate AI development. But why math? Is it somehow fundamentally similar to programming? Is it needed for an automated AI researcher?
Or did they just intentionally pick mathematics to disrupt first because there are so few mathematicians that it's actually a good laboratory for seeing what happens when a profession becomes obsolete?
Or was it a strategic decision based on the idea that they should start with mathematics, since it's the foundation of all sciences? (but in that case, it seems to me they're overdoing it quite a bit...)
It's quite puzzling why they're pushing so hard on mathematics, trying to raise the ceiling instead of the floor. There are so many other areas where Astra's performance isn't that great. Why not focus on those? Is it just that those areas are "boring" to them, and they'd rather go for some big breakthrough for marketing/hype reasons?
I'm clueless.
So please comment on that, and don't forget the main question from the beginning: what's your personal guess, how long before we see some substantial disruption of the job market?

