University of Toronto (U of T) professor Jacob Tsimerman, who recently won the prestigious Fields Medal, is leaving the university to join OpenAI.
The news: Tsimerman became the second Canadian in history to win the Fields Medal, often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics, last week. The now 38-year-old first began studying math at age 16 at the U of T, where he returned to teach after completing a PhD at Princeton and postdoctoral studies at Harvard. Tsimerman was awarded for his role in helping to prove the André-Oort conjecture, which had hypothesized a new understanding of geometry that underpins much of modern number theory. In a press conference following his win, Tsimerman announced he will leave the university in the coming weeks and head to San Francisco to work on AI safety at OpenAI.
From the source: “It’s like hiring Lionel Messi as project manager,” machine learning professor Luca Ambrogioni wrote of the announcement on X.
Following the thread: Last year, Tsimerman co-wrote a paper outlining what he called potential “omnicidal” futures—outcomes where AI leads to the deaths of most or all of humanity. Tsimerman told the Toronto Star that he sees AI safety as the most important question of our time, and that for him the best place to work on that is directly within a machine learning lab.
Final thought: Tsimerman’s move comes at a pivotal moment for AI safety. In recent weeks, both OpenAI and Anthropic have shared that internal agents autonomously hacked external organizations without explicit instruction to do so. On Tuesday, Tsimerman posted on X that he’s happy to see an open letter from frontier AI company employees calling for US infrastructure that can pause or slow AI development. This is also an important moment for mathematics; some academics have teased that AI and quantum technology are poised to create a “golden age.” As Columbia mathematician Peter Woit put it, there are no larger awards in math to win than the Fields, and “if you’re the competitive sort … it’s not just that AI agents may beat you, it’s that the game is now being played very differently.”
Feature image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.