Everybody Is Losing Their Minds About AI Math And Crypto

The gang talks about what AI getting Good At Math might mean for cryptography, and why public-key cryptography probably isn’t ending. David is on a mission to civilize and claims a crisis of empiricism. He also wrote a blog post about this. Everyone agrees Nadia deserves tokens.

“I mean, you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist!”

Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2026/10/27/everybody-is-losing-their-minds-about-ai-math-and-crypto/

Chapters:

00:00 intro
05:19 rumors swirl
12:37 math etiquette
17:11 magical math machines
21:42 diffie-hellman
29:50 finite field
34:45 david aware
42:36 complexity theory
48:40 full disclosure

Links:

- David’s Blog: https://dadrian.io/blog/posts/everybody-is-losing-their-minds/
- Similar opinions from virgi: https://people.csail.mit.edu/virgi/thoughts.txt
- The OpenAI Math Drop: https://github.com/openai/math
- Scientific American on the OpenAI math drop: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openai-unleashes-hundreds-more-math-results-upon-a-field-already-in-shock/
- Derek Thompson on AI’s impact on math: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/i-know-why-the-mathematicians-weep
- Sophie Schmieg’s blog connecting elliptic curves and finite field DH: https://keymaterial.net/2025/05/23/there-is-no-diffie-hellman-but-elliptic-curve-diffie-hellman/
- Friend of the show Steve Weiss factored RSA-896 with spare Anthropic capacity: https://saweis.net/posts/rsa-896.html
- Alex Clemmer’s tweet about the shortcomings of complexity theory: https://x.com/hausdorff_space/status/2107916908616175701
- Ben Recht (Berkeley ECE) on the FFT improvements showing how complexity theory can be disconnected from real computers:: https://www.argmin.net/p/faster-fourier-transforms
- State of the art number field sieve implementation (CADO-NFS): https://cado-nfs.gitlabpages.inria.fr/
- Why 128-bits of symmetric security is enough for quantum resistance: https://words.filippo.io/128-bits/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadia_Heninger
- https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~nadiah/
- Matt Green’s Tokens to Humans estimator: https://bitsofwork.org/

"Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David Adrian (@dadrian)