Fields Medalist Dun Yu Criticizes AI Companies Over Anti-Distillation Defenses
Fields Medalist and University of Chicago mathematics professor Dun Yu criticized AI companies for refusing to disclose reasoning chains in mathematical research under the guise of anti-distillation policies. This highlights a growing conflict between the scientific community and AI companies over academic transparency, attribution, and the hypocrisy of commercial AI models mass-scraping human knowledge while withholding their own working processes. Dun Yu proposed that the mathematical community should build and maintain its own open-source models to avoid dependency on commercial AI giants, while strictly enforcing academic norms like data usage and traceability.
## BACKGROUND
Knowledge distillation in AI is a technique where a smaller model is trained to mimic a larger, more powerful teacher model. Reasoning chains (Chain-of-Thought) refer to the intermediate steps an AI takes to arrive at a solution, which are crucial for academic verification and peer review.