Artificial intelligence (AI) has overtaken the best human minds in mathematics, says Capriole Investments founder Charles Edwards. He calls AI the new apex predator, yet almost no one seems to notice.
His claim follows a month in which AI matched elite students at the world’s toughest math contest. Yet the same systems still stumble on ordinary professional work.
Did AI Just Cross the Line in Mathematics?
Edwards, a member of BeInCrypto’s Market Intelligence Expert Council, made the case on X on October 21.
“This is a evolutionary turning point. The last month has been perhaps the first time AI has surpassed the best human intelligence in certain fields, like mathematics. Human intelligence is now no longer the apex predator.”
At the 2026 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), models from Huawei and Xiaohongshu scored a perfect 42 out of 42.
Only seven of 666 human contestants managed the same, according to the official IMO results.
In early October, OpenAI gave an unreleased model roughly 4,000 open problems. It returned 722 research manuscripts grouped into 372 families of results.
Stefano Gogioso, an Oxford lecturer on BeInCrypto’s Future Tech and AI Experts Council, put it bluntly.
Mathematical rigour is now free.
AI’s builders go further. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in July that the world is “now, like, in the singularity.”
Elon Musk, meanwhile, told The Economist that AI could exceed humanity’s combined intelligence by around 2031.
Who Feels the Predator First?
International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva has warned that young job seekers face the greatest risk.
Payroll data backs her up. Employment of 22- to 25-year-olds in highly AI-exposed jobs now sits 19% below its expected trend, per Stanford researchers.
That gap stood at 15% a year earlier. It stems from fewer hires rather than mass firings.
Layoff announcements tell a louder story. US employers cited AI in 120,136 planned job cuts through September, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That is about 21% of all 2026 cuts.
Is Bitcoin’s Math Next on the Menu?
The same release rattled crypto. Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake argued that mathematical superintelligence had arrived.
He urged large holders to prepare a “bunker mode,” moving funds to never-used addresses.
The fear is that AI-driven math could weaken Bitcoin’s wallet cryptography without any quantum computer. Every address that has sent funds exposes its public key on-chain.
However, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin advised against rushed migrations. Coinbase cryptographer Yehuda Lindell dismissed the warning as alarm without evidence.
So far, there is no sign that the underlying cryptography has been broken.
Where Does the AI Apex Predator Still Fall Short?
OpenAI itself cautioned that not every proof has been independently verified. Gogioso also noted that many of the solved problems were already close to a human solution.
Paid work is harder still. Scale AI’s Remote Labor Index tests agents on real freelance projects. The top agent delivers professional-quality work on about 21%.
That share stood at 2.5% when the index launched a year ago. Former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun still argues that human-level AI remains years away.
That jagged record may explain the silence Edwards describes. AI now dominates narrow arenas while staying patchy across the wider economy.
AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton once suggested asking a chicken what life is like below the apex of intelligence. For graduates and Bitcoin holders, that question no longer feels hypothetical.
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