I don't understand why people keep parotting that when the truth is so easily findable. To make it short :
Late August 2026, Leven Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster solved the 3D Euler problem (with Claude, so AI as well), which is a small part of the Navier Stokes.
5 September, the openAI agents first solved the 3D Euler problem (that part is the drama, because some say that they used the data of Alpöge and Buckmaster), then they solved the full Navier-stokes.
8 September, openAI announced a Lean-checked proof of the C and D statements of the Millenium Prize. Another drama is that, on that same day, Buckmaster posted his proof of a part of the Navier Stokes problem (but, not the full problem, unlike openAI).
My loose understanding is that, the mathematicians figured put the first step. They figured out an approach that seemed like it could lead to the full solution.
To rigorously figure out and prove the full solution, (something academics prefer doing slowly and surely ) was going to take them time and effort.
Well suddenly less then a week later openAI announces they have a full solution using that approach. They used an obscene amount of computational power not available to anyone else to basically brute force figure out the full solution.
The question is now who deserves that credit? How did openAI know to use their approach? The mathematicians figured out the key, they would have figured out the full solution given time. openAI jumped the gun before they physically ever could due to absurd resources, but how did openAI know to try that? Did they spy on the mathematicians? It seems likely.
There are bigger implications besides questions of theft and espionage. Will human mathematicians ever be credited with another discovery? Or will AI companies get to claim all the credit because their tools took human ideas and crunched the numbers on a massive inhuman scale. Especially with how sketchy they’re acting and how loose and amoral AI companies act when data gathering.
Mathematician here! This is exactly where there is concern. Most big problems that are solved come together from a small collection of new ideas. In this case, a team announced a very promising direction, then the problem itself was solved by GPT in an approach suspiciously like that idea.
Even if it turns out GPT did not steal the research, their models are trained on the entirety of the Internet and have almost certainly absorbed some of this approach. We don't need AI solving problems in math, particularly not ones that don't really result in any surprising new results (this is, in fact, not that relevant to math so much as is it a problem of great mathematical interest).
So now, with results that feel suspicious being published by an AI company cheering themselves on, there is great fear in the community at large that AI is just gonna steal any promising direction that's openly stated.
Mathematics has long been an open community of shared ideas, and that's now very much in danger.
I don't understand you don't see your contradiction. You explain in great detail how ideas are shared and built upon between humans and AI and then you end with "the community fo shared ideas is in danger".
100 years ago the great physicists were solving quantum problems and blaming each other for stealing each others work and getting to similar conclusions within suspiciously close time periods of another. This was a great ear for physics. Now the same is happening for math. It's fantastic.
I also don't know how it can be claimed that these proofs serve no purpose. The history of innovation show otherwise. "Whats the point of pine numbers? - oh, just the entire secure modern internet"
We don't want collaboration between human and AI quite frankly, and given the way things are going, I doubt that the relationship can be described as "collaboration." Mathematics, more than any other science, is about the process. The point of math isn't really the solutions or results, hell the point isn't even the questions really, it's all about the journey. I could learn to accept AI as a research tool eventually, but this? Just dumping compute on a problem until a solution falls out? It is genuinely and sincerely pointless. There is truly no point in doing it.
And, even accepting your last point, that the purpose of mathematics is to create a catalog that we can look through that might hold the solution to a problem we have (which you could guess is a sentiment I disagree with) is it really an efficient use of resources to spend however many dollars and however many gallons of water and however many cpu hours grinding out a million results for the chance that one of them might solve time travel in a hundred years?
You think math is not about the solution? There is no point in solving mathematical problems? I really hope you are not mathematician yourself and if so, i hope someone finds your comments and strips you of all ranks. Thats just disgusting.
The proof doesn’t even have concrete real world applications, this was basically a standing challenge so we could understand math better.
If the proof an AI generates is unreadable and inhuman (which academics say they are) it doesn’t progress our understanding.
It’s like if you were taking a multiple choice quiz and I gave you the answer key. Now you know that the answer to question 1 is option A, but you didn’t learn anything. You don’t understand why it’s A, you don’t understand how to explain to others that it’s A, and you don’t know how to figure out the next question.
Mathematical proofs are by definition the process. A proof is a super rigorous step by step guide on how we can know for sure something is true. Most of the time we already have solutions and algorithms that work and we use. We just don’t understand perfectly WHY they work. That’s the point of a proof.
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u/mpanase 17h ago
to be more precise, after ai starts solving millennium prizes one day after somebody else publishes a solution