Exactly one year ago, I was a happy-go-lucky university professor writing my papers. I would have described myself as someone who had enjoyed the privilege of being good at mathematics. And then there was a dramatic change. Now I'm deeply troubled. For the first time, I struggled to assemble questions that ChatGPT would get wrong. These models know more facts than any human you would ever find. I was devastated. I was thinking, how am I going to stay ahead of AI? I actually think that's the wrong question.

Knowledge quickly became cheap. If our goal is to always stay ahead of AI, then I think we're going to lose. Nobody would be interested in watching Usain Bolt race against a motorcycle in the one-mile run. It's not a fair race. But we still watch the Olympics. We as a society now know how to accept that machines can outperform humans in every physical way. But we're still now coming to grips with the fact that the brain, deep inquiry, computers have caught up. The large language models should be thought of as the most extraordinary librarian the world has ever seen. If it has been written down, the large language model has probably seen it. Good luck with competing with that ability to collect information. Knowledge is now cheap, but how you use it and how you verify it has become more expensive. Human judgment is important. My identity has changed.

My view on intelligence now has changed quite a bit. The ability to reason, make proper inferences, whether you can do it quickly or slowly, it doesn't matter. But can you create a new concept? Can you generate ideas? Can you string concepts together in a deep way? That is intelligence. That is not the regurgitation of facts and we're not good at teaching that. Are you good at setting the dials to design a system from scratch that was going to produce some gadget whether it's as an industry or a computer program or perhaps a whole new area of science. That's deep intelligence and it rarely is the form that is recognized in schools at any level. Do you have the ability to recognize patterns in areas of thought that can be transferred from one discipline to another so that you can propel another area forward? There's an element of recognizing a target of opportunity that is genius. The student, the worker who becomes an expert in their niche field because they plug away and learn something new about that field every day is so hard-nosed and is so committed that that is also intelligence and a kind of genius that we need to recognize.

I have a very unique personal story. I'm a son of a mathematician. When I was a child, I was considered gifted and my parents decided I was going to be a mathematician. For me, it almost went in a very bad way. I dropped out of high school. In April 1984, a letter came to the house from Janaki Amal, the widow of the Indian mathematician Ramanujan. Seeing my dad cry—he never cried—brought me to tears. Ramanujan was a mystic, an autodidact. He had visions of mathematics. Because of his passion for mathematics, he ended up flunking out of college twice. Here's my dad talking about someone who was a two-time college dropout but had left behind three notebooks filled with formulas. It gave me hope. It was the first time I heard my parents look up to someone who hadn't gone to Harvard or Princeton and was a perfect student. Later, flipping through the channels, I saw a documentary about Ramanujan. I started to work on a thesis based on his work. By 1993, the bombshell news in mathematics was a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, and the proof depended on these Galois representations I was studying. There must be other Ramanujans walking planet earth. How do we find them and how do we nurture them?

Some of your best students worldwide are stressed out in high school, worrying about getting into the right college. If you're motivated to participate in those just because they are checkboxes, that's messed up. Education starts with inspiring people to want to know more about the world. Play for children is science. Think about how wonderful the world is when you get to learn about it without worrying about what your future and what your reputation will be. I utterly hate that students are worried about whether they get an A and how that impacts their GPA. It's an opportunity lost. What I like about AI is the access to knowledge. I could learn everything that you would learn bookwise academically from a large language model at my own pace. What I would not get would be the human access, how the right questions were derived, what the next questions in a field might be. That's why we still need professors. If we could maintain that wonder and the energy that children have when everything around them is new, think about where we would be today.

The best scientists in the world need to still view the world as a wondrous thing. The best doctors in the world still need to recognize that what they practice is supposed to come from a place of benevolence. If we pay so much attention on and value so much perfection and speed in ordinary test taking, then how are we training someone to be the next Einstein? For my children, I want them to be passionate about the world that they live in. In the United States, you could come out of college with $150,000 in debt and then discover "I can't stand the sight of blood," but now you can't leave your profession because of loans. That is purgatory. Who owns your identity? You do.