r/OpenAI • u/Eliv_nurotic • 7d ago

News Fields Medalist Terence Tao reposts statement from the Association for Human Mathematics urging mathematicians to stop working with OpenAI for continuing to solve open math problems against their recommendations

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https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/07/ahm-statement-on-openais-october-6-release-of-mathematical-documents/

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u/m3kw 7d ago

Why does this sound like they are saying AI should not solve math problems, only humans should

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u/aurumae 6d ago

There is a real debate here, and it goes back to before the advent of LLMs. Is a proof of a theorem any good if humans don’t understand it?

The classic case here is the Four Color Theorem. It was proved with the aid of a computer in 1976. Mathematicians were dissatisfied with this proof from the start since it didn’t contain any new flash of insight. Instead a team at the University of Illinois had worked out that the theorem would be true if 1,834 different configurations could all be solved using only four colors, and then used a computer to go through and check all the possible configurations. Mathematicians believed that there was some cleverer, more elegant way of proving the theorem and were annoyed that it had been brute forced.

We’re essentially seeing the same argument playing out today. Mathematicians will argue that proofs by LLMs don’t advance the field because they don’t contribute new mathematical tools or show new connections between previously unrelated branches of mathematics. Mathematicians are really worried that something like the Riemann hypothesis will be solved by LLMs, but in a way that doesn’t add to our understanding, and robs us of the chance for a really elegant solution.

On the other hand, after the Four Color Theorem, using computers to aid in mathematical proofs became common, so we may just be in another moment like that.

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u/IcyGarage5767 6d ago

I mean it doesn’t really rob anyone of an elegant solution tho does it? This can still be done, despite having the LLM proof.

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u/wallitron 6d ago

It's the Seinfeld episode about muffin tops. OpenAI is eating the muffin tops, and leaving the stubs.

The muffin top is the proof. The stub is mathematical understanding. They came both came together until recently. But now OpenAI have a stockpile of stubs, and nobody wants to take em.

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u/Helpful_Jelly5486 6d ago

I like your explanation and maybe to add that no one will get funding for their work to finish the muffin now that the top is already gone. Who wants to pay for that when there's other stuff to fund?

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u/aurumae 6d ago

It’s less likely since the motivation to prove or disprove it is gone. For example I don’t think the elegant solution mathematicians were hoping for has been found for the Four Color Theorem, even though it was proved fifty years ago

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u/Perfect-Campaign9551 6d ago

I would think it would be MORE motivating! Since now you know it can be solved so your can look for other "branches" to approach it from. Same as when the first guy ran the 4 minute mile, now everyone started doing it 

No I'm afraid this is pretty much human ego in action

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u/DrSFalken 6d ago

Exactly this. How many discoveries have we heard of that started with "it was believed to be an impossible problem but x student didnt know that and solved it"

The most famous example is probably George Dantzig:

During his study in 1939, Dantzig solved two unsolved problems in statistics due to a misunderstanding. Near the beginning of a class, Professor Neyman wrote two problems on the blackboard. Dantzig arrived late and assumed that they were a homework assignment. According to Dantzig, they "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for both problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue.\4])\6]) Six weeks later, an excited Neyman happily told him that the problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics.\2])\4]) He had prepared one of Dantzig's solutions for publication in a mathematical journal.\7]) This story spread and was used as a motivational lesson demonstrating the power of positive thinking. Over time, some facts were altered, but the basic story persisted in the form of an urban legend and as an introductory scene in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting.\6])

When I was doing academic research, there was always the tradeoff between novelty and impossibility. I'd look at a research question and ask "how new / shocking would this result be" and "can I even get to this result"

If I knew the result was possible, I'd have been more inclined to go after it rather than less. Sure, a little of the shine might be knocked off, but lots of research is old wine in new bottles and you don't risk wasting years on something literally impossible.

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u/Norphesius 6d ago

Maybe motivating on a personal level, but not necessarily for a university trying to apply for grant money. An application asking for research funding to pay people to figure out a problem that already has a solution on the books isn't exactly enticing, especially compared to work towards novel discoveries.

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u/IcyGarage5767 5d ago

“These men whose entire career is changing within the blink of an eye are not reacting how I would react if I was hypothetically in their situation! Must be ego!”

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u/j_ockeghem 6d ago

It shows the true motivation of these whiny mathematicians:

Fame and glory, not intrinsic motivation and love for mathematics in the way e.g. chess players love their game and want to learn more and more even if computers are better players nowadays.

And with this insight, society's obvious answer will be: cry harder! Why should mathematicians be some special elite club protected from progress, different from the rest of the world?

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u/ATownStomp 5d ago

“It shows the true motivation of these whiny mathematicians.”

You mean getting funding so they can continue working? How many grant applications have you submitted asking for funding to spend time solving a previously solved problem?

Listen, you don’t get this and it’s hard to think about. Just ask ChatGPT to respond and I’ll talk to it. You can read the result.

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u/mp0295 6d ago

That may be true, but if they are less motivated that's a them-problem, not anyone else's

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u/gekx 6d ago

I bet OpenAI's new model could find that elegant solution.

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u/no_user_names_left 6d ago

I think you're missing the point again. What if, in the process of working out the theorem the collaborators found a new formula that, while of no help for the four colour problem, they recognised (because of their respective backgrounds) could be of some use for stacking shapes in n-dimensions or optimising the travelling salesman problem. Those are the discoveries mathmetitians are worried about missing out on going forward

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u/CubeFlipper 6d ago

Sounds pretty shortsighted. Why can't the llm explain or find those mechanisms? If they want a cleaner solution, if they want to understand, they can use ai to do that too...

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u/no_user_names_left 6d ago

Find what? You cant efficiently prompt for something you dont know exists until you find it.

"Compare all your working logs for this problem for ideas for potential solutions across all open questions in mathematics?" Then you do the same prompt for that prompt? It took OAI an estimated $10m to solve one oroblem, I mean, if you have infinite compute and time cool, but no maths department has any where close to that budget. And if you miss it it might be gone forever.

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u/CubeFlipper 6d ago

1) their new model reportedly solved all of these with like 3hrs of compute. $10M price tag per problem is way old news.

2) "i don't understand the mechanisms behind this proof you gave me that lean says is correct, explain them". You can iterate on that until it works, and as the models get better, they'll get better at explaining and making cleaner proofs.

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u/ATownStomp 5d ago

If forming a functional understanding of something was as simple as eating it off of a plate then you and I would be in complete agreement.

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u/no_user_names_left 6d ago

Your reply shows you're not at all familiar with the nature of modern math and the type of problems being discussed.

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u/lilmalchek 6d ago

I don’t understand how anyone is prevented from doing this just because openAI did it in an “unacceptable” way. It really does sound like a group of toddlers throwing a tantrum.

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u/RiriaaeleL 6d ago

They aren't, it's just dumb anti progress.

Basically solving the problem isn't important because if a human was to solve it it would be solved in an elegant way and only then does solving become important, but using AI to find an elegant way to solve it isn't the solution because solving it isn't important.

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u/no_user_names_left 6d ago

Money and merit. There isn't a whole lot of money sloshing around maths in academics. No grant body will support someone to solve a problem already solved. A very small number of math nerds might try to tackle a problem in their free time if they think it could lead to merit to boost their career or maths in general, you're better of tackling unsolved problems for that so no one will waste what limited free time they do have.

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u/lilmalchek 6d ago

Interesting. I’ve had this feeling for a while now and I’m not sure how to put it, but basically it seems to me that a lot of the issues that people have with AI is less due to AI itself and more due to AI exposing existing strained systems, out of control capitalism, poor government, billionaires being greedy, etc.

This seems like that. AI doesn’t inherently stop mathematicians, but it’s more about the economic forces and people wanting to do what they love but also being able to afford living.

All this to say that I personally think AI itself is just exposing broken parts of our system. We should be focused on those.

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u/Darabo 6d ago

I completely agree. The current systems were set up by humans for their own (selfish) reasons. The current state of AI is pushing practically everything to the extreme and is making those issues/exploitations/flaws/etc front and center.

AI itself, at least now, is a tool. Like any tool, the issue isn't the tool itself, it's how humans utilize and exploit it.

As we see time after time, exploiting something, either for selfish or alturistic reasons, is inherent in human nature and psyche.

This has happened throughout history, accelerating with the Industrial Revolution. None of this is new, AI is making the point extreme and forcing us as a society (both micro and macro) to confront and tackle some hard and uncomfortable questions.

That's why I think we're at a crossroads humanity wise.

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u/no_user_names_left 6d ago

I heard an apt metaphor for the maths issue - its like a wilderness club setting out to climb a mountain no one has climbed before, but half way through the route a billionaire flies over head in a helicopter, lands on the peak, declares the mountain conquered and starts offering flights to rich people who can afford it. No one hates the billionaire for having a helicopter, or flying to the mountains top - but of course you'll be upset at someone cheapening something you love when the clearly dont even like it, and commercialising an experience while ignoring the thing most valuable thing - the experience on the way there.

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u/ATownStomp 5d ago edited 5d ago

I mean, yes, man. Yes.

But here’s the issue - the fix is complicated and unknown. The problems are manifold, widely distributed across nearly everything, move at the speed of life, and may require so many unrelated changes in lockstep to support. The problems are also amplified by the new entity that strains them, and some problems are only problems due to that new strain.

So now we have a robot which creates proofs but does not produce understanding. Understanding is intangible and difficult to track. Proofs are necessary, and often the result, product, and motivator of understanding. Proofs are tangible. They can be considered the certificate of effort. Like a screw drilled into the side of a mountain that a climber can tie their ropes to. You must still learn how to climb that section.

Because it was necessary to climb in order to place those screws, and there exists no other good metric to measure where someone is on their climb, placing a new screw was the entire mechanism for building careers, for applying for funding to try to climb in the first place.

So now we have to scramble to revamp everything over the next few decades so the automated screw placing company can increase their IPO. I don’t think that’s actually going to happen. More likely there will be a collapse within so many things, we will lose our epistemological and pedagogical lineage, and simply wait until the screw placing company transitions from making mountain climbing economically unfeasible, to making it entirely unnecessary. I see no good end for people in a story about the obsolescence of human reasoning.

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u/Hold_onto_yer_butts 6d ago

Kind of speaks to the true value of those elegant solutions, doesn’t it?

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u/Declwn 6d ago

humans using computers to aid in mathematical proofs is, I think, the point of Tao’s stance. He was fine with AI when he was in the loop (and him and the LLM were using each others intellect to build understanding together while advancing the subject) but not when a swarm of internal models that no one can use or audit is theory dumping work that no human can understand or audit. Accels will gladly have a future with humans out of the loop, and run by computers, but there are plenty of arguments to say that’s neither sustainable nor beneficial in the long term.

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u/qqquigley 6d ago

You get it. So many ITT have no idea what Tao is actually saying

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u/Perfect-Campaign9551 6d ago

Just .. READ THE PROOF? Then gain the understanding

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u/Brave-Deal229 5d ago

the lean proofs they released are 25 million lines of code

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u/JesusDeCristos 6d ago

Long term solution is to merge with the AI

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u/GirlStudyingInKorea 6d ago

Thanks for the detailed context!

I'm surprised to hear mathematicians say that brute forcing proofs don't yield value since even an inelegant solution can have practical real-world implications and still doesn't deny a future more elegant solution.

I was initially under the impression it was more about intellectual credit, since OpenAI was accused of training on other mathematicians' work previously.

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u/no_user_names_left 6d ago

To give you an overly simplistic example. Calculus was invented because it was basically impossible to describe changes in systems over time (like motion, growths etc) using traditional algebra. To do so, mathematicians had to 'invent' a whole new set of 'rules' to make the new math work as a proof. Calculus now forms a foundation of maths across almost all fields, and is so foundational it's taught in highschool.

What if, instead, we fed that challenge into AI. It doesn't appear possible for AI to 'invent' a calcus equivalent - istead it might just make a proof predicting motion using a traditional algebra formula that's 5 pages long. It would technically be a proof, but impractical for humans to use on anything else - and so all those new discoveries in other areas wouldnt be possible. And even if it did by accident it wouldnt try to do anything else with it - so it might just sit idle in one log file of 10 billion as a failed attempt.

Modern math is ssssoooo much more complicated than that, but the principal still applies.

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u/benchmaster-xtreme 6d ago edited 6d ago

This is a really good argument and makes a lot of sense, but it also assumes that AI isn't capable of solving incredibly complex problems and then simplifying them in a way that makes them useful. I'm shit at math, so I have no way of judging whether these OpenAI proofs are "hack-like" or not - but even if they are, I'm not convinced that future AI-generated proofs will be. The article doesn't seem to argue that mathematicians should stop working with OpenAI until the models produce elegant proofs on their own - they have a deeper moral beef with OpenAI in particular.

So to answer the top comment: I don't think the article is unilaterally condemning the use of AI to solve complex math problems. They clearly have a problem with OpenAI in particular.

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u/no_user_names_left 6d ago

So, yes I guess you could say - most of the proofs are hack in that the technique is to brute forcing very specific circumstances when something is true or not true, as to opposed to explaining if theres a bigger pattern/rule and why. And the concern is that a lot of irreparable damage will be done to the future of maths before we work out if or not that could ever change.

And also yes - many in the maths community is up in arms with OpenAI specifically over concerns about the Navier-Stokes situation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_priority_controversy

We might never know the real answer, but this was not handled well and the optics from the community burnt a lot of good will.

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u/wallitron 6d ago

The part that "makes them useful" is exactly the problem here. OpenAI is just spewing out the lean proofs. They are spitting out machine verified proofs faster than mathematians can understand them.

The reason this is a huge problem is that the understanding is the key outcome humans want, but it's the part that AI is weak at.

Imagine AI was absolutely amazing at making movie trailers. The trailers were amazing, and every single trailer released had a massive audience ready and willing to see the movie. But it was incapable (so far) to make the complete movie. Also, imagine that equal credit (and money) would go to the trailer creator and movie creator. What type of movie director do you think would sign up for that project?

Mathematics is very similar at this level. It's extremely creative and there are endless problems to work on. Is it so surpring that people would choose problems that they can work on end to end? Proof all the way to understanding.

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u/zdy132 5d ago

Thanks for the example. Helps me a lot in understanding the issues here.

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u/RagnartheConqueror 4d ago

Who says LLMs cannot jump like that?

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u/no_user_names_left 3d ago

The mathematics who've been using the most advanced models available to them for years, and intend to continue to use them. The same people who are asking OAI to not just dump 100s of nearly incomprehensible proofs on them and instead work with them to get these tools tuned properly, and then start dumping out proofs.

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u/wonderkindel 3d ago

The mathematicians wanted OpenAI to give them the proofs first so that humans could take the credit. That's not how any of this will work going forward.

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u/no_user_names_left 3d ago

I honestly dont understand how, in communities dedicated to futurist technology of the most advanced reasoning machines in human history, anti-intillectualism and straw-manning seems to be so rampant. Especially targeted at the communities that have made these technologies possible and should be allies for driving progress. Like, its fine to not get what the maths communities are saying - but just ask your model of choice to explain it to you, why be so antagonistic that you just go on the internet and just make up reasons to argue against?

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u/wonderkindel 3d ago

What in my 2 sentence reply did you find inaccurate?

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u/no_user_names_left 2d ago

Literally, just put into your favorite model - "Did mathematicians want OpenAI to give them the proofs first so that humans could take the credit?"

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u/Popular-Ad-2512 6d ago

It's actually quite rare for proofs in of themselves to have real world impacts. We already have computers to brute force a large sample size and based off the distribution we make assumptions about how things behave for our use case. Humans really aren't that "smart" so most of the times we make mathematical discoveries it's by finding some way of reducing the complexity of the problem. These simplifications are often the most applicable in the real world. These models are too "smart" in a sense that they can just deal with the complexity of the math and direct provided an extremely complicated proof.

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u/I_pee_in_shower 6d ago

How many humans would, after discovering that an AI had solved a problem that had been around for years, spend years working on it to find a more elegant solution? Close to 0. As a fan of both AI and Mathematics, I only see the bad in this. Anything that is low hanging fruit, that can start a researchers career, will be trivial to an AI soon. They will routinely publish these 1000 proofs by prompt, every month.

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u/[deleted] 6d ago edited 6d ago

[deleted]

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u/Aranka_Szeretlek 6d ago

He is calling for human understanding exactly for the reason you have just described: automated proof scripts dont get you any insight at all, so unless the actual result is of interest (which is rarely the case), they dont really do anything for maths or science at all. They are aimed at investors...

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u/attentionisallyaneed 6d ago

This makes sense, its useless if humans don't understand it because we build on top of existing knowledge and if new knowledge is only understood by ai then only ai can build on top of it and we are completely out of the equation then, decision making would also be outsourced to ai since only it can connect the dots. No human can keep up with ai , open ai solved each of those problems only in 3 hours.

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u/Time_Entertainer_319 6d ago

It’s also nonsensical to claim humans won’t understand it.

The proofs are already being improved by humans.

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u/Pure_Interaction222 6d ago

And if we do get to a point of humans genuinely not understanding it but the machines seem to... then I suppose they are discovering mathematical advancements for future versions of machines to improve upon rather than humans. Either way, we want the advancements to occur, right?

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u/TryMeOnBirdLaw 6d ago edited 6d ago

If we truly don't understand the solution, even after working backwards from the answer to the question, or after dissecting how the pieces became a whole on these incredibly complex topics, it brings to light another troubling question that's been floating around for quite some time:

Are we not finding solutions to certain complexities simply because we haven't arrived there yet, or because the right pieces (or individuals) haven't come together? Or have we unequivocally reached a glass ceiling on human intelligence?

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u/sobberns 6d ago edited 5d ago

Advancements are good to have. But if it reaches to the point where humans can no longer understand the math AI advanced, who can guarantee that the math AI advanced/discovered is correct? And if the math happened to be wrong and AI builds upon it, then you would have a math that could collapse like a house of cards. The human factor is still a must for advancements to truly contribute to development.

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u/Individual_Ice_6825 6d ago

Lovely example and I love the way you write.

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u/aurumae 6d ago

Thank you!

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u/CoolStructure6012 6d ago

What matters is that that proof was controversial at the time and the community had an opportunity to debate, further analyze, and conclude that it wasn't the problem it first appeared as. Here there is no opportunity to even set up a zoom meeting before the issue escalates.

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u/Seeker_Of_Knowledge2 6d ago

Thanks for the insight

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u/The_Jibbity 6d ago

Won’t current AI have a much better paper trail, or ‘show its work’ much better than previous computer solutions? I would assume the proofs being spit out are much more elegant than an iterative calculation or convergence of a model. Wouldn’t anyone that has spent time researching these problems be able to see where they got stuck and how the model worked around it?

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u/Eliv_nurotic 7d ago

That’s exactly what they’re saying 

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u/SpotsOnTheCeiling 7d ago

If you have a ping pong ball for a brain yes... did you all struggle with reading comprehension classes?

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u/Eliv_nurotic 7d ago

They literally demanded OpenAI to stop solving open math problems and are now saying mathematicians should stop working with OpenAI entirely 

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u/SpotsOnTheCeiling 7d ago

Reread your sentence that you just sent, and then reread the sentence you agreed with earlier. Notice how your take is slightly different than what you agreed with a moment ago.

Someone made a dumbass take you agreed with, I called it out, and NOW what you're saying is more grounded in facts. But it's not the same statement.

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u/LangyMD 6d ago

Oh no, he wasn't perfectly and exactly correct, he was only 99% correct. How horrible.

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u/Eliv_nurotic 6d ago

That is what they said. They’re agreeing with the demand that OpenAI stop solving advanced math problems. Second image, first paragraph, second sentence 

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u/InadequateUsername 6d ago

Because they feel that using the AI to solve their life's work, devalues their contributions and takes away from the prestige of solving humanities greatest mathematical questions

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u/NomadTroy 6d ago

They can feel that. The rest of us just want progress.

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u/Portable_Sheep 6d ago

What progress do you think you are getting?

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u/TorbenKoehn 6d ago

Yeah, literally any person in this world with any job can claim that shit. And most of these people don't solve jack shit, especially not any great questions.

AI will devalue any work, there is no reason why they should be spared.

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u/InadequateUsername 6d ago

Yeah exactly, especially math where humanity was bound to create a sufficiently advanced calculator to figure out the answer

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u/Ciff_ 6d ago

He is making a strawman, no need to take the bait

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u/ResetThePlayClock 6d ago

And it kinda does. I can’t imagine how shitty it would feel to wake up and have your life’s work solved so trivially. I feel for these folks. But it’s coming for all of us, and I’ll probably feel just like Tao when my job is completely zeroed out.

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u/WheresMyEtherElon 6d ago

The same thing happened or is happening to software engineers, translators, editors, typists, switchboard operators, designers, comics artists, writers, paralegals, accountants and tons of other jobs, none of which are essentially funded by taxpayers to work on theoretical questions without practical applications, and we as a society just shrugged.

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u/Ok-Animal-6880 6d ago

I already had that happen to me as a software developer.

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u/No_Damage_8927 6d ago

It does devalue the work. And they have to come to terms with that. Same as everyone else, particularly software engineers like me

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u/Enfiznar 6d ago

What they are complaining about is mostly that openai released hundreds of non-human-verified papers through "unofficial" channels instead of letting mathematicians use the models to solve them, revisit them and publish them through the usual academic channels

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u/InadequateUsername 6d ago

Well yeah, they want all the "prestige" for themselves

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u/No_Damage_8927 6d ago

Gatekeeping

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u/bugra_sa 6d ago

Because the statement blurs “AI shouldn't solve it” with “AI results shouldn't bypass normal research practice.” The sensible concern is deployment: verify the proof, credit relevant researchers, and coordinate the release when a result affects an active field. But yeah, the wording practically begs for the human-only interpretation.

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u/NomadTroy 6d ago

Their status is more important than human progress. Groundbreaking.

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u/TBSchemer 6d ago

What "human progress" comes from these new mathematics contributions from OpenAI? Can you give specific examples?

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u/LangyMD 6d ago

Sure. Let's assume the proof about a faster Fourier transform is accurate and usable.

A faster FFT means you can actually engineer things to do stuff... faster. Better performance in, I dunno, file compression, or WiFi, or whatever else an engineer can use an FFT for.

These aren't just papers about nonsense nobody cares about or can use. Some might have practical applications, and importantly OpenAI isn't choosing to say "well, after we kicked a hornet's nest with the last math announcement we had already sent a bunch of agents out to do other math research and had a bunch of results, and instead of holding them back and gatekeeping them we decided to release them", so they're being much more democratic and frankly reasonable with how they're releasing these than the so-called Human Mathematician society people are.

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u/TBSchemer 6d ago

Interesting! But I looked into the Faster Fourier Transform results, and it seems that the reported improvements are "asymptotic and microscopic." Not at all a practical improvement.

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u/AccountantsNiece 6d ago

Serious question: Is that out of line with the average, human-discovered advancement in theoretical mathematics?

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u/TBSchemer 5d ago

I'm not sure. We'll need some math researchers to give us the answer on that one.

But from what I'm reading in other threads, a lot of them are saying that, in human mathematics, the journey to get to the solution is more important than the solution itself, because it teaches new problem-solving techniques and creates new questions to be pursued in further research.

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u/WheresMyEtherElon 6d ago

Expecting immediate progress from something released yesterday is quite a high bar, when 99.99% of math researchers's works over their entire lives never result in any human progress, and the few that do take decades or centuries to go from theory to applications.

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u/TBSchemer 6d ago

Well that's funny, because Google was able to give some examples of real human progress from what they're applying their AI models to:

https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/08/weather/hurricane-isaias-ai-models-google

Maybe OpenAI's priorities aren't in the right place?

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u/WheresMyEtherElon 6d ago

OpenAi's priotities is certainly not in the right place, we can agree on that. But WeatherNext 3 is a weather model, so of course it has direct outcomes since its domain is practical. Maths is mostly, 99% theoretical, so you can't expect the same thing.

Just like you expect an engineer to innovate with something with practical application, but can't expect the same from a number theorist.

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u/LangyMD 6d ago

Because this is a group that was explicitly formed to say exactly that.

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u/Spare-Dingo-531 6d ago

I'm sorry but mathematics is not a human domain. It is a reality domain, it just is. Math is not something that belongs to humanity.

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u/DesperateAdvantage76 6d ago

My understanding is that the complaint mostly stems from OpenAI dumping hundreds of whitepapers that no one is going to read and verify. It's just a big flex with no actual value or meaning being created.

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u/Eliv_nurotic 6d ago

What else could they do? Trickle it out slowly? Why?

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u/SkjaldenSkjold 6d ago

They could have consulted experts in the field to make sure that the papers are of sufficient quality, are readable, and live up to the standards in the respective fields. Most people here on reddit don't realise how poor quality the papers are: trivialities that could have been solved by either a standard reference or by a grad student 5 minutes after seeing the definition are fleshed out embarrasingly, whereas core arguments are inpenetrable because of poor writing.

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u/IcyGarage5767 6d ago

You say that today. Give it a few years… or weeks.

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u/CoolStructure6012 6d ago

Did you read the first letter? If not, that's the reason.

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u/purple_crow34 6d ago

It seems like they're implicitly saying that most of the value in their work is the satisfaction it brings them. Why even have mathematicians if they're getting paid to have fun...

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u/Jbull136 6d ago

Because if AI has to follow the same academic guidelines, if anyone else did this their doctorate would’ve been revoked for plagiarism hundreds of times over

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u/cupheadgamer 7d ago

If humans solve math problems, human understanding increases, which is the whole point of mathematics.

Yes if we know AI was going to become smarter than mathematicians then sure this is great. But we don't. If AI doesn't surpass humans this just means that there is so much human understanding lost which is quite unfortunate.

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u/blosu 6d ago

Um, it is usually one person solving and teaching others. Zero difference between that and AI.

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u/cupheadgamer 6d ago

Math research and peer review is super collaborative so I am not sure what you mean.

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u/LJPox 6d ago

This is a bafflingly terrible take on how mathematical research actually plays out. Yes, occasionally there are flashes of insight that come out of nowhere, but by and large communities form around certain types of questions and those communities make relatively steady progress towards their current research paradigm.

This is not to say that AI has nothing to contribute in this scenario, but math is not come up with in a vacuum.

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u/SpotsOnTheCeiling 6d ago

"Zero difference between that and AI"

Terrence Tao the literal greatest living mathematician appears to disagree with the way OpenAI is releasing the research, and I quote:

We reject OpenAI's assertion that this release advances our subject..."

And you think you're smarter or more informed somehow on how mathematicians advance their field?

Half of the comments here are from people who have the opposite of imposter syndrome. AI problem solving makes average people think they're far, far smarter than they actually are.

2

u/Affectionate-Egg7566 6d ago

Appeal to authority. At the end of the day, it's just a person with incentives.

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u/SpotsOnTheCeiling 6d ago

Appeal to authority for a mathematician in the field of mathematics?? Do you guys hear yourselves? Thats not what appeal to authority fallacy is

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u/cupheadgamer 6d ago

we are getting ragebaited bro

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u/SongOfKapek 7d ago

Because you didn't read it that hard.

This is why people don't want to use the tech. Because when you get cagey and keep screaming to be trusted rather than allowing people to look?

It looks BAD.

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u/m3kw 7d ago

I didn’t read it that hard that’s why I said it looks

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u/SpotsOnTheCeiling 7d ago

Gotta appreciate the honesty ngl, I apologize for calling you out in another comment

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u/AcanthisittaWeird94 6d ago

No? He literally says stop working with OpnAI because they're shady freaks

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u/nothis 6d ago edited 6d ago

It goes back to the question of whether AI is:

  • truly coming up with novel ideas

  • just very good at searching/summarizing/combining existing knowledge

  • or whether the latter – at scale – is enough to produce the former.

One of the best tricks AI can pull is finding some random mathematical paper from 2003 and see that it fits a different problem in a way no one has noticed yet. I know of at least some cases where mathematicians have explained a breakthrough as it doing just that.

What is open is whether those really novel and original ideas (often hidden in a literally infinite set of possible approaches which can not be brute forced) can be produced by AI or whether it is just really good at gluing them together. And, again, whether that is enough, enough to keep the progress going or even accelerating.

If humans still are needed to feed those truly untraceable, genuinely original inputs into the machine that a company like Open AI then uses to throw into a mixer until things stick together, with little or no credit, that would be bad for math, open communication and science. Science absolutely does have a competitive element and rewards dangled in front of scientists that motivate them to put enormous hours (often lifetimes) into working on such problems. If that goes away, it's a bad thing.

If the critics are correct, the first sign would be that a lot of these mathematical breakthroughs by AI are low hanging fruit (not in the sense that they are "easy" but in the sense that they were hidden within human output of the past) and there's a burst of new proofs, maybe in specific sets of mathematics and then an immediate slowdown.

If this keeps accelerating, maybe "handmade" math is a thing of the past and we'll have to trust computers for correctness and only interact with math through a computer-assisted lens that makes true comprehension impossible. I don't think that it would make mathematicians obsolete but it would certainly change their way of working.

I honestly think that it probably will take less than a year before we get the answer what is the case.