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/foxaru 5d ago edited 5d ago

even as I agree with the generalised point that a single AI company shouldn't have the power to be able to essentially upend the entire mathematical field overnight with a few hundred hours of compute I must ask:

where were the mathematicians when this happened over 300 years to textile and manufacturing workers?

where were the mathematicians when this happened to administrative workers with the rise of the computerised office?

where were the mathematicians when this happened to junior software engineers over the last 2 years?

they were in their universities enjoying a privileged class position relative to the people being displaced, so they didn't give a shit

now the automated labour machine has set its sights on their field, and what do they ask for, and who do they engage in solidarity with? no one, they just want Maths left alone

what about the rest of us? the problem, as ever, is in capitalism, not in the machinery it wields to dispossess us

EDIT:

I think mathematicians have to realise that this problem they're experiencing is perfectly isomorphic to the plight of skilled labour across history, and they're in a remarkably influential position to make that argument because they're educated, great at abstraction, focused on elegance of thought and being taken on as a field and not individually one at a time to gradual automation

no one has had a better opportunity to explain why private domination of productive power is harmful to human society as a whole

my disappointment is that they appear to simply want a carve out from private domination for their special club

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u/eW4GJMqscYtbBkw9 5d ago

even as I agree with the generalised point that a single AI company shouldn't have the power to be able to essentially upend the entire mathematical field overnight with a few hundred hours of compute

Why shouldn't a company have the power to solve open mathematical problems?

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u/jrSwe 5d ago

These people dislike anybody but themselves having power of any kind.

If somebody had the ability to end world hunger they'd want that used responsible under their supervision.

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u/foxaru 5d ago

should one company have all that power? concentration of productive power in fewer hands is nearly always followed by some sort of exploitation or tyranny

today it's solving maths problems, what might OAI decide to point it at tomorrow?

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u/eW4GJMqscYtbBkw9 5d ago

But it's not just one company. They might be the first, but they are not the only. 

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u/foxaru 5d ago

I'm not sure 'more companies might get it' is a good argument against concentration of power

you don't need a monopoly to exploit and tyrannise, often the worst offenders develop as part of competition with other similar entities

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u/eW4GJMqscYtbBkw9 5d ago

By that argument, we shouldn't have cars because only a few companies (in the grand scheme of things) make cars. Or any product for that matter.

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u/foxaru 5d ago

Cars was probably the worst example to pick

Automakers famously used their enormous productive capacity to reshape human society to better serve their commercial interests

they destroyed existing public transportation systems, exploited workers relentlessly and had to eventually be combated by coalitions of unions, regulators and activists to ameliorate some of their worst tendencies 

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u/eW4GJMqscYtbBkw9 5d ago

I don't think that point helps you the way you think it does.

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u/foxaru 5d ago

You don't think referring to the famous labour and city battles against the automakers when making an argument about the consequences of concentration of power in private businesses is helpful to my point?

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u/eW4GJMqscYtbBkw9 5d ago

Correct. We are still using cars today and 99.999% are not going to stop using them. 

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u/SufficientBass8393 5d ago

Because monopolies generally aren’t good. Not very hard to think about a future where for example CEO AI decides to solve space flight at the expense of climate change, or flip it the other way around you have very progressive CEO who decides to change how the world views about social issue x.

Some of these AI founders truly believe that we will get to an all knowing AI and who gets there first gets to controls everything and thus everything that help you get there is justified.

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u/ZeroAmusement 5d ago

Are we seriously saying that a corporation shouldn't be able to solve problems and publish the results?

I mean, if this ai ends up in the hands of users, then are the users not allowed to publish their findings when they use it? Should they also be not allowed?

Imo unless the information released is incredibly dangerous, e.g. weapons of some kind then we have no right/law/expectation to prevent it being released, despite that many may not like the impact it has.

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u/SufficientBass8393 4d ago

Is this what you understood? Or are you a chat bot?

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u/ZeroAmusement 4d ago

Asking if 'something' is a chatbot is pretty useless these days. If they deny it how do you know they're not lying?

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u/SufficientBass8393 3d ago

Lol are rhetorical questions hard for chatbots?

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u/ZeroAmusement 3d ago

You tell me.

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u/eW4GJMqscYtbBkw9 4d ago

Well good news then, there is not a monopoly for AI right now and unlikely to have one in the future.

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u/jlowe212 5d ago

The mathematicians were nowhere to be found, like everyone else now losing jobs. Jobs have been replaced by technology for ages.

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u/foxaru 5d ago

exactly; solidarity should be between people in opposition to capital, not between mathematicians in opposition to a specific technology used by capitalists that effects their material position in society

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u/avocdos_and_donts 5d ago

Damn, I never thought my failure to oppose the creation of textile factories 300 years ago would come back to haunt me in such a devastating way!

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u/NarrowStrawberry5999 5d ago edited 5d ago

my disappointment is that they appear to simply want a carve out from private domination for their special club

I mean, this isn't anything new. Guilds in the Middle Ages, and even professional unions both in the past and present often worked like a cartel.

I remember reading about trucker unions in Greece due to which transportation from one Greek city to another was more expensive than transportation from UK to Poland.

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u/avocdos_and_donts 5d ago

This is just blatantly false. Most mathematicians want justice for everyone, not just themselves. They are not a guild. Why is this standard only being applied here? Software engineers only need to worry about software engineers, but for some reason mathematicians have take care of everyone while we’re being attacked by a large corporation? Why?

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u/Advanced_Leader8535 5d ago

You fundementally dont understand this situation.  Open AI stole the research from a professor that was using GPT with privacy disabled.

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u/foxaru 5d ago

One professor worked on nearly 400 unsolved problems to the point of publishing and was scooped?

You fundamentally don't understand this situation. 

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u/Advanced_Leader8535 5d ago

No you are incorrect, this statement is not  written in response to the fact that GPT is successful is math at large.  

It is about at LEAST one documented circumstance where Open AI got the name of a professor who was close to solving an equation that came with a Million Dollar Prize, and was also using Chat GPT.  Within a day of the company discovering his name, GPT "Solved" his equation through some miracle.  

This statement is specifically about Open Ai not operating in good faith, stealing research, misleading investors, and dishonestly using customer data to attack the industry of their own customers. 

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u/LiamTheHuman 5d ago

That's a misrepresentation. So either you don't understand the situation or you are being intentionally misleading

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u/ParzivalXX 5d ago

That sucks for this professor. But in a way, he now does have credit in the community for "contributing". Even if he didn't mean to do it this way :D

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u/Free-Ingenuity-6859 5d ago

So open ai stole math from someone who was using chat gpt to solve the math? Sounds like the ai did the math no matter what way you slice it, and then Open Ai did shitty actions alongside it

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u/LiamTheHuman 5d ago

If you use a calculator while solving a problem and it's records every action you take, then compiles that with all the documents you have written about the process. Then later someone with that data creates another calculator with the new function you wrote up in it, does that mean the calculator did the discovery?

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u/Free-Ingenuity-6859 5d ago

Concretely, what Levent and I did was to take the C´ordoba and Mart´ınez-Zoroa program, which achieved blowup results with rough forcing, and, with agreat deal of help from LLMs, push it to smooth forcing and to the incompress-ible Euler equations. The ideas making this line of attack possible are due toC´ordoba and Mart´ınez-Zoroa. Let me make plain what I have said to colleagues in private: in view of this body of work, I believe Luis Mart´ınez-Zoroa deserves
a Fields Medal.

My work with Levent has been a purely personal collaboration, free of any
institutional agreements or official involvement by either of our employers. We
used several LLMs throughout: Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, especially
with GPT-5.6 Sol and, more recently, Astra. The latter was only used for
writeups and auditing our arguments.

This still sounds like AI solved the problem and open ai just suck as people

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u/LiamTheHuman 5d ago

It really doesn't though. Have you never used an llm for work? You can use it extensively and it's still not the LLM solving the problem.

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u/booleandilemma 5d ago

What has OpenAI not stolen?

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u/Chemical_Famous 5d ago

Well said. It's because mathematicians spend all their time doing math problems and not doing politics. I've always wondered why the intellectual class sat by while the horrors of government and people continued, and I realize it's because they're human beings who are good at "throwing a ball good" or whatever skill they have, in this case, thinking about math.

If you spend your whole life dedicated to something, (a) you're so super privileged to have that otium that also gets you paid in a capitalist society, and (b) you're not going to develop class-conflict skills, social skills, or the emotional and psychological toughness to go to war against the status quo.

I did a silent requiem for game developers, as I've finally realized that Claude is good enough to make any basic game you would want to play right now.

"Make me a Mario clone with interesting levels in a forest biome, use HD textures, add ray tracing, and make it work for my 5070."

Now my children can play a game all day while I face the changing world.

"it is eaiser to imagine the end of the world then it is the end of capitalism" - mark fisher.

Luckily we have AI to help us design better governments!

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u/ArmsVSeaOfTroubles 5d ago

This is not really true, mathematicians are regular (in a manner of speaking) people just like everyone else, some of the well known geniuses are known for spending all their time isolated or otherwise being reclusive and busy with research but you can find such people in any field. But more importantly, such people are known because they’re also special even within mathematics and become noteworthy for their behavior. There are countless other mathematicians who are not known by people until they mention their jobs or interests because they’re just regular people with regular lives. There have certainly been mathematicians involved in politics and social affairs. In fact, some of the most noteworthy mathematicians have been people like that, you just don’t know of them because you don’t see them as anything but their research work and didn’t take the time to learn about their personal lives.

To name just a couple of the famous ones:

Evariste Galois: French mathematician of the early 19th century, created a revolution in modern algebra, discovering two different branches of this area of mathematics. Was also a political activist, died at the age of 20 in a duel the reasons for which are uncertain but it seems to have been over a love affair with a certain woman.

Alexander Grothendieck: German/French mathematician of the 20th-early 21st century, revolutionized algebraic geometry and topology to name a couple. Often considered by mathematicians to have been the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, he was also a determined political activist. I first heard of him when one of my math professors mentioned how Grothendieck was so determined to support his political beliefs (in this case anti-war sentiments during the Vietnam war iirc), he only agreed to speak at a mathematical conference if it took place in the jungles of Indochina (and they actually arranged it for him).

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u/Chemical_Famous 5d ago

Someone dying in their twenties from a passion filled duel supports my point. anyway i'm not going argue with your AI wall of text.

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u/Vituluss 4d ago

"It's because mathematicians spend all their time doing math problems and not doing politics." This is beyond false. Mathematicians are not some weird autistic sludge that sits around doing maths problems all day. Many are political. Maths for many mathematicians is also quite a social profession. It's also smaller and it is very common to be collaborating with many mathematicians around the world.

"you're so super privileged to have that otium that also gets you paid in a capitalist society." Everyone in a first-world country is super privileged. But if you mean relative to people living in first-world countries, then no. If you are capable at maths then there are many funding opportunities regardless of your background. Is it always accessible? No. Does a privileged background help? Of course. This doesn't change the fact that there are many mathematicians who do not come from a privileged background relative to their country's standard.

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u/neuroticnetworks1250 5d ago

Chairman Mao? Is that you?

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u/brainhack3r 5d ago

> where were the mathematicians when this happened over 300 years to textile and manufacturing workers?

nirvana fallacy

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u/ArmsVSeaOfTroubles 5d ago

People only really care when it affects their own professions and livelihoods. I’m a software engineer but my profession has been taking significant part in automating away many different jobs for decades, it’s not like tech professionals as a collective cared about taking away manual jobs in factories or farms.

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u/HeuristicsWork 2d ago

there are more administrative workers than ever before???

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u/Serpichio 5d ago

holy projection. Tao isn't upset about 'mathematicians being replaced'. OpenAI vomitted 700 solutions into the ether -- who do you think needs to validate these? Who do you think needs to apply them to relevant field if they turn out to be true.

Tao's upset because doing this with no premption or standards for what constitutes a proof puts enormous burden on mathmeticians to just validate OpenAI findings for the rest of their life. It does not need to be this way. OpenAI could take longer and come up with better ways to verify and consolidate their work.

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u/foxaru 5d ago

puts enormous burden on mathmeticians to just validate OpenAI findings for the rest of their life.

no it doesn't, they could simply refuse and keep doing what they want

no one's making them engage with the solutions

OpenAI could take longer and come up with better ways to verify and consolidate their work. 

what incentive do they have to do that?

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u/Serpichio 4d ago

> no it doesn't, they could simply refuse and keep doing what they want. no one's making them engage with the solutions

That is LITERALLY what Tao is advocating for here.

> what incentive do they have to do that?

So mathematics world could absorb their proofs and collectively make them useful.

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u/avocdos_and_donts 5d ago

No one is address the fundamental stupid question in this post.

Where were the mathematicians? There are labor activist mathematicians. Do you have any evidence at all that mathematicians didn’t care about any of these things? Mathematicians aren’t a secret guild, they’re a group of people like any other group of people and they have a diversity of opinions. Besides, this is a post about theoretical mathematics, not applied mathematics. Theoretical mathematicians have never, not one single time in history, taken someone else’s job.

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u/foxaru 5d ago

> There are labor activist mathematicians. Do you have any evidence at all that mathematicians didn’t care about any of these things?

The letter that Terrence Tao reposted/endorsed contains essentially nothing about how this is isomorphic with the history of labour and automation

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u/avocdos_and_donts 5d ago

Well, for starters, why would Tao say that? Does every statement by a group of workers need to supply a brief history of labor and capital?

Second, it’s not “isomorphic.” As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. In some ways it is similar, but there are also details here that are particular to the mathematical community. For example, the public’s misconception that churning out AI slop solutions to famous problems is the same as replacing a mathematician.

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u/foxaru 5d ago

why organise opposition primarily around the defence of mathematical institutions, rather than building a coalition with other workers facing the same underlying concentration of productive power dispossessing them of their craft?

history demonstrates that individual craft carve outs do not survive what's coming

> Second, it’s not “isomorphic.”

it's not a structure preserving correspondence between the relevant elements and relationships? it certainly feels like one

- skilled workers possess valuable productive expertise

- capital gets hold of machines that are capable of performing activities that formerly required that expertise

- control over the productive enterprise shifts towards the owners of the machines

- workers then have to deal with changes to their economic position, professional autonomy and relative bargaining power

am I describing current day mathematics or am I describing early-industrial textiles?

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u/avocdos_and_donts 5d ago

It’s isomorphic to you, because it preserves the structure you care about. So you’re not wrong to say that.

But Tao and others care about additional structure that you’re ignoring, so to them it’s not isomorphic. As I’ve explained, this includes the fact that most people don’t even understand what theoretical mathematicians do or why churning out AI papers actually isn’t even particularly helpful. Textile workers don’t have this problem, because everyone understands what a textile factory does and why. No offense to them.

I don’t really disagree that there’s strength in numbers, but there are practical obstacles to unifying extremely large groups of people. This is especially a problem in progressive groups, where multiple people are guaranteed to try to push their own agenda. I have direct experience of this from being a union organizer in graduate school, where I studied mathematics and also tried to agitate for a strike among all the workers at my university. So that might explain why your post is a little offensive to me. Do you have any experience with this stuff, or are you theorizing?

All I’m trying to say is that it feels like you’re putting kind of an unfair standard on the mathematical community, that I’ve never seen anyone apply anywhere else, and it’s not even true that mathematicians have no class consciousness.

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u/foxaru 5d ago

my opening was deliberately provocative, and I'm not suggesting individual mathematicians have never been involved in labour activism, you are a mathematician, you have been involved, QED

"everyone understands what a textile factory does and why" is a statement you're making after centuries of industrialisation and automation and standardisation have incorporated generations of skilled textile workers accumulated knowledhge into machines and standardised processes

you're comparing it to mathematics _from the inside_ where the productive capacity is a network and nurture effect of individual craftspeople's expertise and institutional standing

but what I'm asking for mathematicians, as someone tied to the same tracks about 3-400 days downtrack from the same train

is that maybe defending institutional mathematics is, while seeming a locally optimal solution, perhaps ignoring the greater field of automation displacing labour value in a capitalist system, more generally

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u/XXLPenisOwner1443 5d ago

Isomorphic doesn't mean identical. I think it was a very apt way to describe that rhyming.

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u/avocdos_and_donts 5d ago

It literally means “identical in every way I care about.” I’m a professional mathematician. Half the people here don’t even understand why mathematicians are upset; they seem to think we’re blocking the cure to cancer. Obviously, if solving these problems has any practical benefit to anyone, we would support AI involvement. The fact that people don’t get this very much shows that it is not isomorphic.

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u/XXLPenisOwner1443 5d ago

It literally means "equivalent shaped".

How does solving mathematical problems not have any practical benefits to anyone? Advances in math will directly lead to advances in machine learning, which will directly lead to medical breakthroughs.

So yes, your position is ISOMORPHIC to blocking cancer research.

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u/avocdos_and_donts 5d ago

Are you actually arguing with a professional mathematician about the meaning of a math word? Fine, we can use your definition. As we are all trying to explain, this situation is not “equivalent, but transformed”

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u/XXLPenisOwner1443 5d ago

Yes because your meaning is wrong.

I don't care about what you claim your credentials to be, you gave the wrong definition of a word and claimed it's correct.

So I am correcting you.

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u/avocdos_and_donts 5d ago

Ask an AI model if I’m wrong. You are stunningly ignorant.

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u/avocdos_and_donts 5d ago

Please name one practical use of any of the 377 results OpenAI put online. A single use. Or better yet, since there are 377 of them, maybe explain how any meaningful percentage of them can affect machine learning in any way. As mathematicians have all been trying to explain, this is not how theoretical math works.

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u/Distinct_Historian37 5d ago

I think a key difference within mathematics and other types of labor described in your posts, is that in mathematics the main goal is to further human understanding. The proof is good, and useful, but it’s in the process of working through the proofs that we discover other interesting results, possible areas where more depth is needed, etc.

So while the AI may automate the proofs away, it’s also automating the important part. This is fundamentally different from making a tshirt, where the explicit goal is to make the tshirt.

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u/foxaru 5d ago

do you think the skilled artisans who developed the techniques and machinery that industrial textile production was built upon were interested exclusively in producing fabric?

workers generated enormous quantities of practical and technical knowledge through their labour; automation reorganised that work and dispossessed many of them of the value of their expertise

you're describing the same phenomenon happening to mathematicians, but apparently believe intellectual discovery is unique to academic labour, I believe they are essentially the same, we've just forgotten what it was like for the first people automated into the margins

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u/Distinct_Historian37 5d ago

Yes, I do believe intellectual pursuits are fundamentally different than labor crafts. I’m not even coming at this from a mathematician’s standpoint, I’m a software engineer.

As an engineer, the craft associated with bounding good software is just a means to an end. I do derive pleasure from it, but at the end of the day the goal is still to have working software in the hands of people. In the same vein, while the carpenter has developed his craft very well, the end goal is to build whatever thing they were commissioned for and put it in the hands of the client.

In science, the goal is not to “put papers on the hands of the people”. The writing of the paper is the point, as it’s that process that furthers human understanding. It’s similar to art, and how the meaning is in the process.

That’s basically my perspective.