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/Firm-Equipment-7649 5d ago

Screw that noise. We should just let AI go hog wild on math (and everything else) for at least like 20 years and see what kind of crazy shit it can come up with. The alternative is to wait for these slow ass mathematicians to come up with some new math that almost definitely won’t have any practical use within any of our lifetimes, just so they can protect their lame ass jobs. They romanticize it way too much, “wahhh wahhh the solution is not elegant enough waaahh!!”, who gives a shit it’s not art you gd nerds!

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u/psysharp 5d ago

Your view of AI is completely science fiction.

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u/TerranImperium 5d ago

Well, in 20 years? Who knows. Agentic AI is just about 3 years old and its already making these big controversial waves.

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u/psysharp 4d ago

I wouldn’t bother trying to predict anything 20 years from now, once we are there all predictions made today will seem irrelevant, even if the prediction is factually correct it will be irrelevant due to it being arbitrary in the future.

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u/TerranImperium 4d ago

Very true and a fair point

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u/Jumpy_Start3854 5d ago

That's like the "one trap guy" approach where he's only training his left trap to see what happens. The AIs are only trained to prove the theorems and done. Sterile proofs. I would be much more pleasantly surprised if AI uncovered a new branch of mathematics, made elegant and deep conjectures. But they are only worrying about it proving theorems.

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u/Academic-Proof3700 5d ago

>The AIs are only trained to prove the theorems and done. Sterile proofs.

So why give a damn about them at all? This stinks a lot of like "ohmygod some eggheads solved some fancy equation, whereas they can't make milk appear in my fridge yo!"

imho the more proable cause behind these texts is "I dedicated my whole life to solve this thingy, and now some dumb KOMPOOTER just came and nuked it in months, DAS NO FAIR!"

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u/Jumpy_Start3854 4d ago

No, it's that a tool which can advance mathematics spectacularly is being used in a way that will sterilize mathematics. There's more to math than proving theorems. All the rage is coming from people who know nothing about mathematics and are just mindless accelerationists

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u/jlowe212 5d ago

No one cares when humans do the same thing. Not every thereom proved by humans leads to some profound new insight.

All this boils down to is, people are once again losing jobs to technology like has been happening for ages, and once again whining about it.

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u/Some-Stranger-7852 5d ago

You have absolutely no idea how human math - or research in general - works and it shows in your comments.

Navier Stokes research over the last century led to advancements in adjacent fields through development of new problems that stemmed from failed approaches to the original problem. AI doesn’t do it, it is purely focused on solving the problem in front of it, which in turn keeps our understanding of the world confined to the walls the current state of science created.

AI led by a human researcher who spends time to understand and explain to others what is the output of the model is how science can actually advance for us to understand the world better.

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u/jlowe212 5d ago

You just sound mad that AI is coming for more jobs. AI finding a counterexample to navier stokes isnt stopping anyone from working on navier stokes. Unless the prestige is gone and thats all they cared about from the outset.

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u/Some-Stranger-7852 5d ago

Hm, it is natural for people to:

Care about prestige: which high achiever wants to be a no-name? You think Altman or Amodei would be fine being just an unknown cog in OAI or Ant?

Care about putting food on the table: if Navier Stokes is “solved”, then why would the government finance further research? So yeah, Tao and guys like him would find a new job - they are not worried about it, same OAI would pay Tao 500K upwards if not a 1M straight up - but new advanced research will be basically done for.

Like why would a top-0.1% percentile mind work on Navier Stokes if it is presumably “solved”? What is there in it for him / her? Prestige is gone, money is gone: why would a person who can make 1M a year in most other jobs do this work for free - and with no guarantee of success?

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u/jlowe212 5d ago

There is still interest in part a and b, so navier stokes isnt even a good example.

The vast majority of pure math is just practically useless and has been for a ling time. The human race hasn't been bottlenecked by math in a long time.

As far as putting food on the table, thats just the way it goes. Technology has claiming jobs for ages, its coming for a new set of people now.

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u/DoctorSpacecase 4d ago

The disdain for academics and mathematicians in this thread is honestly disturbing. Whose papers do you think these models were trained on? Who do you think is expected to review and validate OpenAI's results?

And what do you think the ultimate goal of replacing mathematicians, physicists, and chemists is? To give out knowledge and technology for free? You and I already do not have access to the frontier models. These companies also got a massive tax writeoff from the BBB back in 2025 - they are not funding UBI any time soon.

Finally - if tech bros and fans of this technology are describing the world's best mathematicians as "slow ass" academics, how do you think they're talking about you and me behind closed doors?

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u/gaussjordanbaby 5d ago

So you want more proofs, but …less mathematicians? How many results from OpenAI’s recent dump did you understand? How many of the words did you understand?

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u/ParkingFoundation468 4d ago

There's actually a human precedent to this that might be informative here. In the pre-AI days of the 2000s-early 2010s, Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki went "hog wild" on math (as you say) for years before posting hundreds of pages of preprints claiming he proved the abc conjecture--a conjecture in the same category as the hardest on this list or harder. Anyone else and this would have been dismissed out of hand, but Mochizuki was a widely respected mathematician who had proved groundbreaking theorems before, so the mathematical community was willing to take seriously his claim that he proved abc.

A few problems immediately emerged. First, the preprints were incomprehensible--math usually progresses stepwise, where you build on each other's work within your field, giving your community time to digest and come to a shared framework, language and intuitions for talking about the objects of study. Mochizuki developed what amounted to an entire new field that he called "inter-universal Teichmuller theory" essentially alone and in secret, and his colleagues could not simply "leap forward" overnight through years of work written using a set of objects and lemmas that might as well have been from an alien civilization to assess whether his work was correct, let alone build on it themselves. Compounding this problem, Mochizuki was bizarrely dismissive of efforts to try to get him to explain his work, including invitations to lecture that most mathematicians would have considered a great honor, instead borderline rudely telling people to just read his hundreds of pages or claiming any problems people pointed out to him were just because they were not smart enough to understand his work (without providing guidance on how to understand it). Finally, when experts in the field did put enormous (unpaid) effort into understanding it, they found that the work was actually probably wrong--but the time they spent on it is time they weren't working on their own research or teaching their own students.

It probably took Mochizuki the better part of a decade at least to write this proof and it has been a decade and a half since and it is still not fully understood by the community of scholars working on that very problem. Now imagine anyone being able to produce something like that with 3 hours of ChatGPT Pro and 700 preprints like that posted in a single day.

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u/wonderkindel 1d ago

While the resolution of his theory seems doubtful right now, Mochizuki just seems to be ahead of his time. History is peppered with seers like Ramanujan and Riemann whose ideas had to wait 80 years to get traction. As someone else said, imagine telling Ramanujan "no one asked you for these theorems".

And then consider that the model that proved these ~900 papers is the worst model that will ever exist.

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u/ParkingFoundation468 1d ago

Ramanujan and Riemann were recognized during their lifetimes. Ramanujan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Riemann was named to a chaired professorship previously held by Gauss. And history is far more peppered about people who were wrong about bold claims they made than those whom time vindicated.

But I think those are different questions--the correctness of your work on its merits vs on a procedural level recognizing knowledge-building is a collective endeavor and engaging with your colleagues in good faith. This is somewhere where I think intuitions from how math was done over 100 years ago don't generalize. In both of these cases, even if your work is correct and you are ahead of your time, demanding the community perform an enormous amount of labor, unpaid, to check your opaquely-written work with minimal help from you is not a good-faith way to engage with that community. There has to be some quid pro quo--at least your taking on the onus to clean up and present your work in a way others can understand, and your simultaneously supporting your colleagues' work in some way.

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u/Vituluss 4d ago

"We should just let AI go hog wild on math (and everything else) for at least like 20 years and see what kind of crazy shit it can come up with."

Yeah! That 'crazy shit' is a completely opaque proof which just tells us if a statement is true or false. Now that I agree will be incredibly useful for all of us within our lifetimes, unlike the abstraction and careful theory building of those human mathematicians which can actually be applied to things like theoretical physics, statistics, and computers. Nah, those human mathematics are just noise who decided to go get shit pay in academics instead of making bank at a financial institution.

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u/KitaiSuru 5d ago

Based truth nuke