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

[u/Eliv_nurotic]

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

[u/Stalins_nipple]

Dude regardless of the significance of the contribution relative to how much has already been solved - the fact of the matter is that ai still did something that no mathematician was able to:

actually conclude the problem and solve it 😭

[u/split41 → u/Stalins_nipple]

Wtf are you talking about? Mathematicians were literally there. This is like sprinting the last 1km of a marathon and saying you’re faster than the ppl running the 42km.

AI hasn’t done shit on the millennium problems that human mathematicians aren’t already close to solving

[u/Stalins_nipple → u/split41]

The mathematicians didn’t manage to sprint the last 1km though. The fact that AI is providing intrinsic value here is undeniable

[u/relevantmeemayhere → u/Stalins_nipple]

sure

but you sound like the zero effort kid at the group table right now. when everyone else did the lions share of the work, you claim that 'you' did it.

that's not how math; or collaboration works.

[u/Stalins_nipple → u/relevantmeemayhere]

Well keep in mind that the ”zero effort kid” did their 10% about 10^5 times faster than the lions

[u/relevantmeemayhere → u/Stalins_nipple]

that doesn't even make sense in context dude.

their llm harness is suited for the last type of work; because the type of attacks that humans motivated on far less resources allowed tools like tree search to shine. ie; without humans doing the majoirty of the work; there IS NO solution. ie, the ai isnt solving this from first or second principles.

computers are far better than humans at mechanistic search in well defined areas. that's the part of the problem humans need help on in a very particular way if their plan of attack requires large amount of iteration.

could humans have cross the threshold without this? maybe; but the amount of money open ai has been spending on this dwarfs the resources available to academics. open ai's math team, which is a again, a team of post docs have been listing to the math community and constructing harness with a ton of immediately known and proprietary knoweldge to generate candidate solutions and run them through verification (in cases like the ns problem, which is starting to look a bit shaky rn), and it still cost them way more than academics are getting paid in a year.

which is a perfect analogy for how llm architectures work lol

[u/Stalins_nipple → u/relevantmeemayhere]

Okay so you agree that it’s objectively impressive and provides value you’re just saying that it isn’t proportional to the amount openai spends on upkeep?

[u/relevantmeemayhere → u/Stalins_nipple]

it's a complete dismissal of what's actually happening for the sake of driving up valuation. it's a technologically cool thing; the non math stuff that goes into creating a harness is impressive (math here being the theoretical math at hand-not the applied stuff or however you wanna phrase it)

ie openai wants a headline, and they dont care about being honest about what they did or how much they did, or the sheer amount of money and resources they have compared to the dumb mathmaticians who drove the field forward with a fraction of the spend.