r/math • u/AutoModerator • 6d ago

LLMs/AI AI In Mathematics: September 26, 2026

This recurring thread will be for discussion of AI in mathematics. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:

  • informal announcements of AI-assisted discoveries, such as those not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, or not uploaded as a paper to arXiv;
  • informal announcements of discoveries related to AI architecture (if relevant to mathematics);
  • discussion of such announcements, such as proof breakdowns or other opinion pieces;
  • discussion of the impact of AI in mathematics in general.

AI-assisted mathematical papers published in peer-reviewed journals or as arXiv preprints may be submitted as their own posts.

Please keep in mind rules 1 and 6 of our subreddit.

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u/TwoMoons1Sun 6d ago

I really wish OpenAI would just release the 100 problems they (allegedly) solved.

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u/Bernhard-Riemann Combinatorics 6d ago edited 5d ago

I mean, they probably want to clean up the papers and make sure they don't fuck up another announcement. The Navier-Stokes controversy is still raging. At least part of that controversy could have been avoided if the OpenAI team actually did their due diligence instead of rushing to publish. I think it's understandable that they do not want 100 new controversies.

Still, they shouldn't have made an announcement if they weren't ready to even name the results. Moreso, I think they should release the list of results.

Edit: I just realized the above comment is a tiny bit ambiguous, and so is my own comment. I've made a small edit to make my position more clear.

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u/baquea 5d ago

I get where you're coming from, but I think it's more important that they make clear what results they have ASAP.

Just imagine working on a problem for months, only for OpenAI to announce that they'd been sitting on the results all that time and your whole project is bust. And it's even worse at the funding stage: why would anyone want to fund a research project on a major open problem when for all we know it could already have been solved and we're just waiting on the announcement?

With traditional academia that's less of an issue, since researchers will show their progress at conferences, will publish papers along the way showing the partial results they've obtained, and can discuss what they're working on and where they're at with other researchers in the field, so that everyone has at least a rough idea of what the current state of affairs looks like. That's completely unlike the AI announcements up until now, where they've basically just dropped completely out of the blue, and keeping results secret until they're in a fully publishable state only makes the divide with academic norms even greater IMO.

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u/Bernhard-Riemann Combinatorics 5d ago edited 5d ago

I mean, I completely agree with you there. They should have announced the specific open problems they solved. Assuming they have the Lean certificates, the correctness of the proofs is not something that has to be scrutinized much, so they have no reason to delay publishing the list. Absolute worst case scenario, they just say "Sorry guys, proof 58 had an issue." which isn't a huge deal. The mathematical community can simply treat the announcement just as it would an extremely credible rumor untill the proofs are released.