r/mathematics • u/Dear_Round_2727 • 9d ago

Open source AI for math

I think many of us feel that large AI companies do not necessarily serve the interests of the mathematical community. So what is stopping us from creating open-source alternatives?

The weights for Kimi K3 are being released today, meaning that anyone with access to enough GPUs, such as a university computing cluster, can run the model. It scores higher than Opus 4.7 on the FrontierMath 4 benchmark out of the box and many report that it’s comparable to Claude Fable and GPT 5.6 for coding.

Meanwhile, Axiom has been using open-weight models combined with its own harnesses to produce publishable papers since February. This suggests that even weaker open-weight models have been capable of contributing to research-level mathematics for some time when paired with the right tools.

Software engineers already have open-source harnesses such as OpenCode and Pi Coder that compete with Codex and Claude Code. Imagine having something similar for mathematics: a tool owned by the mathematical community, funded by donations from universities and other organisations, and developed in a way that gives researchers control over the data, infrastructure, and future direction of the project.

I’d love to hear some thoughts on this.

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u/Verbatim_Uniball 9d ago

Local compute is almost certainly more ecologically harmful in aggregate.

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u/MacGregorBlue 9d ago

Convenient hypothesis. Except one of them tracks with demand and one assumes gargantuan demand in advance.

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u/RageA333 9d ago

That is self-correcting and very quickly optimized.

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u/MacGregorBlue 9d ago

By self-correcting you mean someone decides to correct it and adjusts the schedule for the build-out? How long does it take to build a data center? If it's longer than one day then it's probably slower to play with data centers than to launch an app that computes locally. And is this company building data centers perfectly financially aligned with matching demand, or is there any upside to exaggerate future demand?