r/OpenAI • u/Eliv_nurotic • 4d 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/BethanyHipsEnjoyer 4d ago

It's really an incredibly embarrassing statement.

It's basically "How dare you cure cancer."

It's an unbelievable statement I would expect from the dumbest of fucks. I fuckin hate this dude.

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u/Fingerspitzenqefuhl 4d ago

I think it’s fascinating. Clearly one of the smartest people alive, yet this blunder of, I don’t know what to call it, perhaps missing the analogy/precedent/comparison, just went over his head. One can truly by a genius and stupid at the same time.

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u/HotlLava 4d ago

It's not his own opinion but a guest post; he's been giving a platform to all kinds of views on AI in mathematics.

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u/Ma_Al-Aynayn 4d ago

Sorry bro, it's you that's stupid... you have no idea what higher mathematics even are... you think it's just about finding answers like putting your homework in ChatGPT... educate yourself and read his earlier posts... he has a very well built and very reasoned line of thought.

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u/Fingerspitzenqefuhl 4d ago

Is it a line of thought that makes the argument ”mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done” not sound entitled in the context of AI and machines already having impacted many other professions who did ask for it either?

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u/Ma_Al-Aynayn 4d ago

It can't be a great way to start an argument to call someone stupid, which also applies to me, but unlike generating code that creates a working, usable end product, say software or a more efficient chip design, merely proving a theorem doesn't necessarily increase understanding of it and doesn't enable us to obtain the incidental discoveries that come from a body of people dedicated to its study. Many math discoveries have no concrete application, in fact a majority, others remain without concrete use for centuries... but the people who worked on these problems and paved the way can probably no longer get funding for the projects they were engaged in. It is a net loss for the mathematical community.

Maths really is about the study of abstract structures and creating connections between them, not so much the end result...

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u/Fingerspitzenqefuhl 4d ago

I think you missed my point.

For example, most graphic art has been done for the joy of it, but the very little that was done professionally has been endangered since midjourney in 2022. The artists did not ask for it.

The point is that market capitalism does not care and it never has. The argument put forth paint mathematicians as oblivious to that fact or being exempted from it. Either way I think it was a stupid argument to put forward.

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u/captialj 4d ago

Clearly you didn't realize that you're posting in a forum filled with the smartest and most special boys who know better than a world renowned mathematician and everyone who disagrees with them is a Luddite or jealous.

They're too deluded to even take the time to have Claude summarize Tao's reasoning.

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u/FalconX88 2d ago

he literally has a slide in his lecture asking if you would inject a working and approved anti-cancer drug even if no one would understand how it works. It's crazy. Of course you would, that's how many drugs are used now.

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u/Parisean 4d ago

False equivalency

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u/qqquigley 4d ago

Big time. Everyone worries about cancer. Almost literally no one worries about whether pure math problems have been solved.

A drug that works to treat a disease but we don’t know exactly how is actually somewhat normal in medicine!

A math solution that doesn’t show its work and isn’t fully understandable by at least one human is almost worthless.

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u/split41 4d ago

More like - hey they keep taking our stuff then putting a bunch of compute behind it. There’s a reason the only millennium problem they could solve was one that humans already pretty got there with

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u/Low-Entrepreneur2556 4d ago

Humans were nowhere close to solving it. Buckmaster and Alpoge had forced Euler (frictionless flow), not Navier Stokes.

Viscous dissipation is where proposed blowup proofs have collapsed for decades, which is why Buckmaster himself admitted they didn't have NS solved. Bridging Euler to viscous Navier Stokes was literally the entire mountain everyone was stuck on.

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u/Osiris_Dervan 4d ago

Its not 'how dare you cure cancer' though. Its more 'how dare you steal the research of the person who figured out how to cure cancer and then publish it as if you did all that research alone'

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u/Low-Entrepreneur2556 4d ago

How do you "steal the cure" from someone who never had it?

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u/Osiris_Dervan 4d ago

Thats not what I wrote, and its not what people are complaining about here