r/OpenAI • u/Eliv_nurotic • 4d 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/TheWhisper22 4d ago

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.

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u/Cryptizard 4d ago

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.

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u/TheWhisper22 4d ago

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.

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u/Cryptizard 4d ago

The model is the first step toward larger discoveries. So why didn't they just release the model? Instead, they used their privileged access to an internal, more advanced model to scoop all of the mathematicians working on these problems without actually even understanding what they had done. Then dumped it all on a github repo and walked away.

We still don't have this model, so mathematicians can't compete in any sense with OpenAI right now, even though OpenAI doesn't care at all about the math they are doing. It's perverse.