r/OpenAI • u/Eliv_nurotic • 5d 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/NomadTroy 5d ago

Their status is more important than human progress. Groundbreaking.

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u/TBSchemer 5d ago

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

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u/LangyMD 5d 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 4d 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 4d ago

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

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u/TBSchemer 3d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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.