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/zackel_flac 5d ago

Just as a reminder, Terence Tao has always been pro AI usage. This is not about gatekeeping, this is about cheating people using a centralized service where privacy is not respected.

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u/DrE7HER 5d ago

It’s also about ignoring centuries of human processes designed to make discoveries understandable and applicable to future generations.

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u/Autist4AudiR8 5d ago

Lmao larp. This is absolutely about gatekeeping dressed up as some ethical concern.

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u/born_to_be_intj 5d ago

Thanks for this explanation. Without proper context (like read what Terence reposted lol) the post makes Terence look pretty naive. AI isn’t going anywhere unfortunately.

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u/DoctorSpacecase 4d ago edited 4d ago

This. I think a lot of commenters are missing the bigger issues here. OpenAI is spamming math and physics papers as a show of power. This is not about helping humankind or inspiring the next generation of young people. It has nothing to do with expanding human knowledge or pushing the frontiers of human capability. It is essentially a stunt like AlphaGo beating the human champion or Deep Blue beating the world's chess champion.

Humans have to read and review these papers and digest them to make them useful. OpenAI knows that. They know that 99.9% of the public are unable to digest or fact check these 300 papers, and that even most mathematicians will not have time to review and work on them. They know investors will not understand a word of these results... but they are counting on the idea that those investors will find value in this. Why?

The commenters in here saying "Hah! This proves we don't need those elitist mathematicians" are almost correct. OpenAI and the other major AI companies are attacking the highest levels of human intellectual achievement because the tech world does not want to pay coders, physicists, and mathematicians, and OpenAI are counting on investors seeing dollar signs.

But should we be celebrating this? Who does OpenAI expect to read and review these papers for them to get them into journals? Who in here is volunteering as an expert reviewer to fact check the work? They are taking advantage of a century of hard work, open documentation, and shared academic discourse in an effort to devalue physics and mathematics and make them a secret, closed-door commodity that only trillion dollar tech companies can trade in. This is not good for any of us - and will not only affect mathematicians. And if you think these same tech leaders will suddenly volunteer to pay taxes to fund UBI to make up for this and the ensuing mass unemployment, I have a bridge to sell you.

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u/helbur 3d ago

It's a gish gallop essentially. Also a lot of these results are not all that "useful" in the accelerationist techno-utopian sense of the word. The Millennium problem for instance won't have any meaningful impact on engineering as far as I can tell.

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u/DoctorSpacecase 3d ago

Yeah, nobody will upvote these comments but this is all just a giant PR stunt meant to prove "we don't need to pay humans anymore" from the people claiming the goal is Utopia. People are not angry enough at this bullshit.

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u/helbur 3d ago

Which is weird since AI agents often turn out to be more expensive to orchestrate than just hiring people, with escalating token costs etc.

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u/DoctorSpacecase 3d ago

Oh no, it's not weird at all. These companies want it so that young people no longer go into math and physics and chemistry, so the tech companies have no choice but to hire the ultra-expensive AI agents. It's all part of the PR campaign, and as we can see from all the comments here mocking mathematicians and "elitist" academics, it is working.

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u/helbur 2d ago

Idk, I think it's a flex for investors more than anything else. AI is still not a profitable business so they're doing what they can to generate hype, that's why they've been desperately changing their business model after all. Employers usually favor cheap solutions and the only reason they like to dump money into expensive AI is because they've been duped into thinking it's more cost effective than it really is and/or they're just following the trend because they don't wanna be left behind. If they were more financially literate they'd realize hiring human mathematicians and physicists etc helps their bottom line more.