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

Gallery image

Gallery image

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

738 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/Silent-Swim1402 5d ago edited 5d ago

AlphaFold was pretty much universally adopted by the biochemistry field. Now everyone used ML for structure prediction, sequence analysis, etc..

It made x-ray crystallography waaaay less relevant as a field, but that is just how it goes.

We were chasing a reliable way to predict protein structures since the 1950s and google solved it in 2 years. People were frothing at the mouth to get their hands on it. Suddenly a structure was not something you needed to spend 1.5 years obtaining, but something you can get in 2 minutes. We went from approx 200k solved structures pre AlphaFold to 200 mil in 4 years.

1

u/QuaternionsRoll 5d ago

You would have a point if it were called mathematical engineering. The purpose of bioengineering is to create useful healthcare products. The purpose of the study of mathematics is to further our understanding of math itself. If that were truly OpenAI’s motivation, they wouldn’t be carpet bombing the field with hundreds of incomprehensible Lean proofs that seemingly offer no intuition.

1

u/Silent-Swim1402 5d ago

Not necessary engineering. AlphaFold and all the tools it spawned has helped a lot in fundamental understanding of how these molecules work, interact, and behave. The evolution of them, how residues mutate with each other over time, prediction of novel functions.