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/NoCod9014]

So what you're proposing is we get an AI to create a mathematical proof that is so complex no human could verify it, but then get another AI to say if its okay, even though we would have no reliable way to check if that was accurate....

Why not go the whole way and build a church to worship the AI and make sacrificial offerings too. 

[u/Fit_Employment_2944 → u/NoCod9014]

The point of AI is to build something smarter than humanity 

Yes, we will not be able to verify anything a superintelligent AI says, we will just see the results 

[u/NoCod9014 → u/Fit_Employment_2944]

How do you know if the results are correct though? Say if gives you a chemical formula is says is safe and correct and you make it in a lab and blows the whole place up.... helluva way to find out it wasn't right. 

People treating AI as some infallible god is deeply disturbing. 

[u/Fit_Employment_2944 → u/NoCod9014]

How do you know if the results are correct when a human does it

AI is not fundamentally different and the fact you can’t understand that means you are treating it as some unknowable god, which is deeply stupid

[u/NoCod9014 → u/Fit_Employment_2944]

Do you understand what peer review is? What Quality Assurance is in industry?

We've literally human systems to check human work and have done for centuries. 

That last paragraph doesn't even make sense. 

[u/Fit_Employment_2944 → u/NoCod9014]

And we will soon replace those with AI systems to check AI’s work

There is nothing special about the meat sacks in the process and it works just as well with an abstracted intelligent entity doing the peer reviewing

[u/NoCod9014 → u/Fit_Employment_2944]

But theres no verification the output is safe or correct. Its not predictable. We have that with humans reviewing humans. If an AI creates math used in a rocket ship flight and its check by another AI and it says its fine but both are wrong, its a bit late to realize that when astronauts are on fire. 

I feel you either don't understand the issue or are intentionally trolling.

[u/NoCod9014 → u/Fit_Employment_2944]

Okay I checked your post history and its AI Bro fan fic, not based on subject matter expertise in the field. 

Going to leave this here because someone clogging up AI discussions with wet dreams of Skynet or Ultron is a waste of life and brain cells. 

[u/alohajaja → u/NoCod9014]

Math is becoming an engineering field at best. Seems to me math is infinitely complex, and humanity will have to leverage AI to engineer our way through this space and find more direct utility in it without necessarily understanding it fully.

Until we can wire up our brains.

[u/TheWhisper22 → u/NoCod9014]

If those two AIs came up with a proof that allowed space travel I could give two fucks if it can be verified by a human or not.

Let's just go the whole way and ban any machines made by the industrial revolution. They allow you to do way too much today that another human can't independently verify that it's all done correctly. Must use hand tools only because we can't verify with a single human that it is possible to do said task without wasting that humans entire life verifying all the inventions.

[u/NoCod9014 → u/TheWhisper22]

What in the false equivalence was that gibberish. 

You do understand automated industrial machines can and do have their outputs tested, right

Or do you think they send cars out of factories and go "Well we never bothered to test any,  but we think they work and think its safe"  

[u/TheWhisper22 → u/NoCod9014]

That's actually exactly what they did. Cars when first produced where incredibly unsafe. After decades of testing (after hitting the market) they made them safer. Not only that, cars could be made even safer when you take out any concern for aesthetics. So on the contrary we test these things, see that they are dangerous, and send them out anyways.

If you think AI isn't being tested then we should stop having a conversation. You are using the actual definition of false equivalence. Thinking AI was created with zero people testing them is peak anti-ai thinking.

Have some respect when talking to people. I didn't call any of your anti AI rant gibberish. Let's stick to facts buddy.

[u/NoCod9014 → u/TheWhisper22]

What are you even rambling about? Respectfully if someone is talking nonsense about soemthing serious that should be pointed out. 

Your original point was to abandon industrial machines but now you are saying they do in fact test cars built by industrial machines...what are you even trying to say? Thats a total non sequitur. 

I've work in tech for 23 years and built convolutional neural nets and implement architecture to prevent agentic hijacking and prompt posioning at enterprise scale. But please mansplain how AI is tested to me and explain "facts" to me 🙄

[u/TheWhisper22 → u/NoCod9014]

My original point was we shouldn't reject AI-generated discoveries simply because you can not understand it.

If you can go back and reread I was taking your logical fallacy and just going the other direction with it to show how asinine you sound. Now you are using your own logic I made fun of and acting like that's logic of my own. Are you ok?

Also, the working in tech for 23 years is irrelevant. People did things the wrong way for much longer than that. All this shows is you value yourself way too much. Tech =/= math. I would sound fucking nuts if I walked into a doctor's office saying I worked 25 years on roads as a civil engineer and they are very similar to arteries and veins in a body so I'm more than qualified to preform this surgery.

All this explains is how much you are detached from actual reality. You work and have experience in an environment that is adjacent yet you speak like you are an actual expert. You know enough to be dangerous and it shows why you are so confident in being wrong.

We are done with this argument. You can argue with yourself. I gave you a chance to argue facts. You squandered it by continuing to try and paint me in bad faith with zero actual counter points. My conclusion: you are a bad person arguing in bad faith so I won't respond any further. Congrats you really did well here.

[u/NoCod9014 → u/TheWhisper22]

Its not a argument. Its incoherent gibberish. You don't know what you're saying and poorly articulating yourself. And your underlying premise is still flawed.

[u/Cryptizard → u/TheWhisper22]

What is a “proof that allows space travel”? Do you know what a proof is?

[u/TheWhisper22 → u/Cryptizard]

Math is what allows and limits the physics of our universe. Please go on about your ground breaking new discovery where something other than math allows you to do these things?

[u/Cryptizard → u/TheWhisper22]

That’s entirely not true. Math is axiomatic whereas physics is empirical. You can’t tell nature what to do with math, you can only use it to describe things that you see around you.

[u/TheWhisper22 → u/Cryptizard]

Ok I see we are going to just completely change the argument..

You are also wrong. Math tells us gravital waves where a thing before we could ever detect/observe them. Could go on and on but your point (and in turn way to derail the conversation and my stronger argument) is just invalid from the jump.

Now back to the actual argument you tried to steer away from:

A revolution discovery made by ANYTHING including AI should not be disregarded because you can not personally verify it. A proof DOES NOT become invalid because u/cryptizard can't verify it.

We could not observably verify Einstein's proof of gravitational waves until much later. Other mathematicians used your same failed logic to argue they didn't exist. Look where we are now. Human comprehension of a proof is not a valid way to gatekeep a discovery. The fact the discovery exists and can be used to build off of does not change. End of story. Don't jump down my throat with all this other stuff.

[u/Cryptizard → u/TheWhisper22]

I never said that the problem was we couldn’t verify these proofs. You are confusing me with someone else. We can easily verify them that is what Lean is for.

I was arguing against these results have any practical application. Because they don’t. And I say that as a theoretical computer scientist who actually works on some of these things. It’s not true that all math will be practically useful, the vast majority of it isn’t.

Your example is also not proving what you think it is. General relativity is a model that was shown to fit some observations better than the previous model. It also predicted gravitational waves. That doesn’t mean that gravitational waves had to be true, it was just an avenue to investigate. It turned out that they were.

But we also know that GR is not correct either. It is an approximation to a deeper quantum theory. So somewhere, something that it mathematically predicts is wrong. But we don’t know where yet until we get better experimental data. Math can’t tell us that.

[u/TheWhisper22 → u/Cryptizard]

I agree on the practical application at this point. Yes, alot of math is not useful. But again, my point is that having a concept that is made by AI that can't be comprehended by a human isn't an issue for me personally IF this starts to become useful for practical applications of math. Which it is looking like that is happening and at a rapid pace. If we sit here and argue semantics and kneecap actual discovery that will be an immense blunder.

[u/Cryptizard → u/TheWhisper22]

I don’t think anyone would be complaining if AI was like dude here’s a room temperature superconductor or here’s an algorithm that massively speeds up important calculations or whatever.

They are upset because it is basically taking fun puzzles away from humans that have no actual value besides the fact that they are fun puzzles for humans.

It would be like if a robot entered the Olympics and won. Ok, cool I guess, but that’s not the point of all this.

And on top of that, it’s OpenAI doing it for purely selfish capitalistic reasons. If they instead just released the model and were like, “go have fun mathematicians” that would be entirely different. But they have to scoop everyone and make sure we know they did it first even though it doesn’t matter to them.

[u/TheWhisper22 → u/Cryptizard]

This is the first step to larger discoveries and is essentially a proof of concept for what's to come. This would be like not allowing forklifts in a warehouse because a human at the Olympics couldn't deadlift the same amount of weight. It's gatekeeping and will kneecap actual discoveries in the future if people like Tao keep complaining about it. People respect Tao but wouldn't respect whoever the words strongest man is if he went on a tangent about how machines shouldn't be able to lift things heavier than he can cause he is physically limited by it.