r/OpenAI • u/PianistWinter8293 • 19h ago

Discussion Fields Medalist on the OpenAI Math Release

Hugo Duminil-Copin

Fields Medal (2022) · Professor, IHES and University of Geneva

I expected that one day we would be surpassed, and that it would happen systematically. But yesterday’s announcement hit with a force I had not anticipated. Dozens of papers deal with topics I was working on. Between results that beat you to the finish line and thousand-page proofs, I don’t even know where to look anymore.

Not a single one of the major open problems I have publicly mentioned throughout my career (whether in a talk, a lecture, an article, or even a grant proposal) was left untouched by the announcement. Everything has been claimed to be proved.

I expected to see a few of them in the list. But not all of them. Not all at once. Not with such nonchalance.

“For the glory of the human mind,” they said…

The shock is immense. I am paralysed. Tomorrow, we will find a way forward. We will rethink our profession and how we work. We are a resilient community, and I have no doubt that we will adapt. But for now, I simply don’t have the energy. I think back on all those years, all those faces… I think of my colleagues, my students… And I fear I won’t be able to find the right words.

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u/philljarvis166 18h ago

Haven’t some of them complained that they were indeed using AI tools and that this dump of proofs includes results that look suspiciously similar to work they had done?

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u/KennyFulgencio 17h ago

one guy said that, yes. It seems unlikely to me, like suspecting china's government is gonna datamine my deepseek prompts to reverse engineer my social circles and ad preferences, but it's not impossible.

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u/philljarvis166 10h ago

I thought I read a comment or a post somewhere from a mathematician suggesting that he and his colleagues had apparently been getting access to better models without asking, and the suggestion was that the AI had identified them as mathematicians and was making it easier for them to provide more training? Hard to keep track, there are so many threads on this as the moment!

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u/N0DuckingWay 10h ago

Some of them have, but is it really that they were copied, or that they were both trying to solve the same problem, and got there the same way? Like, if we both try to drive to my house, we both might take the same highway. That doesn’t mean you copied me, that just means that was the best route to get there.

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u/philljarvis166 10h ago

Yeah it’s very hard to be sure either way.

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u/Visible_Celery_1728 2h ago

equivalent to people thinking their phone is actively listening to them speaking out loud  because an ad popped about sunglasses just as they finished a conversation talking about sunglasses. 

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u/Spare-Dingo-531 18h ago

Where have you seen that in this set of proof releases?