AI Development Present & Future: Why Classic Math Isn't Enough

MIT Technology Review recently published a fascinating piece titled "What's Next for AI and Math." The entire modern world is built on mathematics, and breakthroughs in this discipline could unlock truly amazing new technologies. However, DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) believes that math is stuck in the past. That's why the agency launched an initiative called expMath (Exponentiating Mathematics), designed to accelerate AI development in mathematics by creating tools that will act as "AI co-authors." The ultimate goal is to build an AI capable of solving the most complex mathematical problems on its own. Researchers note, however, that this requires unconventional thinking, since higher mathematics is an experimental field involving trial and error, and flashes of insight. And despite AI's impressive achievements, we are still far from creating truly "mathematically thinking" systems.

Meanwhile, Russia has announced the results of the third wave of selection for research centers in the field of artificial intelligence. Each of the seven selected universities and research organizations will receive grants of 676 million rubles to conduct research in strong, trusted, and multi-agent AI. According to a statement on the Russian government's website, the winners include HSE University, Innopolis University, ISP RAS, ITMO University, MIPT, Skoltech, and for the first time, Lomonosov Moscow State University. The total amount of grants for AI research in 2025-2026 is 4.7 billion rubles.

Yandex continues to experiment with its voice assistant "Alice" — it has been reported that this summer, the digital assistant is expected to gain AI agent functionality. Thanks to deep integration with Yandex Browser, Alice will not only answer user questions but also perform actions: book a table at a restaurant by filling in the necessary details, buy concert tickets, schedule a manicure appointment, and more. Other popular browsers are also moving toward agents: Chrome has the BrowserAgent extension, which lets users launch their own AI agents. And at the end of last month, Opera introduced Opera Neon with a built-in AI agent that can do roughly the same things predicted for the new Yandex Browser with Alice — book a hotel, order groceries, and so on. Earlier, Yandex integrated AI agents into the support services for its "Food" and "Market" platforms, which, according to the company, sped up request processing by 10-15%.

This week, a major partnership between Samsung and Perplexity AI came to light: the South Korean giant is in talks to pre-install Perplexity on all future smartphones. The service could become the standard voice assistant option in the Galaxy S26 lineup, expected to launch in the first half of 2026. Interestingly, all previous devices in the series used Samsung's own AI technologies and Google's. Now, the focus is on integrating Perplexity's search capabilities.