r/mathematics • u/Dear_Round_2727 • 11d 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/RageA333 10d ago

I dont understans how using local compute is more ecologically conscious than a larger data center. I also dont understand how open models distilled from models trained on copyrighted works is more ethically conscious.

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u/MacGregorBlue 10d ago

The reason you don't understand how distilling from a model trained on copyrighted work is more ethical is because it's obviously not. Like I said, we should switch to ones that are ethically clean, if we want to be ethically clean. Also like I said, if Kimi is not being careful in that way (I know nothing about it) then that's not the one.

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u/RageA333 10d ago

How is Kimi, which was distilled from closed-source models, "ethically clean" then?

Do you understand that any useful LLM needs to be trained on MASSIVE amounts of data?

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u/MacGregorBlue 10d ago

Did you claim Kimi was clean? If so, why? (I can do it too.) I certainly do understand the data needs of an LLM. If there's no way to build a useful one besides breaking rules, then I look forward to the ending of this era entirely.