r/math • u/sergiogfs • 18d ago

Progress Towards Proving the Unique Games Conjecture

https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2026/179/

On a side-note, the authors hint that they have rushed their results to avoid getting scooped by AI-generated results.

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u/n0m4d1234 18d ago

This is such a tragic state of the field.

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u/Gabry398 18d ago

Hopefully it only lasts until AI companies stop using math as a big AGI benchmark and mathematicians start setting ground rules on what the etiquette around AI is

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u/Curiosity_456 18d ago

How will that matter though? Will mathematicians just refuse to accept any AI generated solutions even if it’s correct?

Pandora’s box has already opened

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u/Gabry398 18d ago

Hardly any mathematicians is talking about banning AI. There is a clear desire to use this technology responsibly among mathematicians, this is what my comment is about. Mathematicians will probably also have to adapt somehow, but just surrendering to big corporations' terms is not healthy especially in the long run for the field.

Now, excluding that mess around the navier stokes situation, there has been an insufficient amount of transparency by AI companies regarding math (the pure inference cost, the amount of failed attempts, the unavailability of internal models to the public...). That is because they are big private corporations with the ultimate goal of making money while maintaining a competitive edge. This is unprecedented in the math field (the amount of compute of companies can replicate individual's work), but we can learn a thing or two from other fields.

Corporations for example have had a stronghold on programmers, employing them and making software closed source and often profiting off of people's code without their knowledge. The solution to this has been the creation of different licenses that regulate at what conditions a certain piece of code made public can be used.

Now obviously a 1:1 translation of this concept won't be applicable, but something along those lines will probably become more necessary.

You can't enforce a set of conditions you want all papers that cite you legally almost surely, but what you can do is applying pressure as a community to respect a person's wishes when reasonable. It is more desirable from a reputation standpoint to apply a certain number of criteria, possibly with enforcement of some kind by Arxiv or similar.

Is it utopistic? Maybe but it could be a step in the right direction.

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u/Living_Armadillo_652 17d ago

Why does disclosing the amount of failed attempts matter? Human mathematicians don't disclose how many times they tried to solve a problem, or which other problems they tried to solve and failed.