Comment by mickael-kerjean

There is this infamous xkcd (https://xkcd.com/435/) going like this: sociology is applied psychology -> physchology is applied biology -> biology is applied chemistry -> chemistry is applied physics -> physics is applied math -> math is way up there looking down on other fields

I would argue the main reason AI labs have been focusing on programming is to unlock industrial scale automation, next logical step is to solve math as it's the key to unlock everything else. Once you hold the key for math, everything downstream fields become a matter of compute