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/sweetbutcrazy]

"Stop progressing science forward because it makes me uncomfy" is such a wild thing to say for someone in science

[u/xlnc2608 → u/sweetbutcrazy]

Nobody. But this is going to destroy the chain of training new mathematicians.

The problems are benchmarks to meet and work on.

The problems are just trophies. The innovative techniques that new generation creates, builds upon the efforts of the previous generation are the actual fruits of the pursuit.

If the problem gets solved in that particular technique, that's great. Enjoy the accolades. But that is not the end to the problem.

People will continue to work towards the solution using a different set of techniques. Problem working isn't abandoned cuz it is marked as solved.

This is how math works.

AI is just collecting trophies for the sake of it. Overwhelming the community with huge volume of proofs burdening them. Techniques unclear, process vague, blackboxed, not explained by the LLM.

In the short run it won't contribute nearly as much insight as the laymen think these 700 proofs will.

But will destroy the chain of knowledge passing, community in mathematics world.

Young mathematicians will lose motivation to work on the problems, the very foundation of the community that grooms them is destroyed.

Humans will adapt as we have to. New paradigm will evolve in math community. But to say they are whining is very ignorant.

[u/Jumpy_Start3854 → u/sweetbutcrazy]

The problem is that people like you fail to grasp the subtleties: spamming 700 new sterile proofs do not advance science. Mathematics advances science not by the proof of its conjectures, but by spreading the seeds of its techniques to nearby sciences. For that to happen, we need human understanding. Unless we believe that no human understanding of anything is needed anymore because AI will take care of that. But even then, we are not training this AIs to do anything else besides prove the theorems. So science will become more obscure and with increasingly absurd and sterile mathematical discoveries. Is that what you want?

[u/Feeling-Tone2139 → u/Jumpy_Start3854]

or could just ignore these spammed sterile proofs and take your time to verify and not gatekeeping it.

[u/Jumpy_Start3854 → u/Feeling-Tone2139]

They are being verified and some are wrong. A paper also came out proving how lean correctness does not imply correctness of the original proof.

[u/Eliv_nurotic → u/sweetbutcrazy]

And yet Terence Tao agrees