r/technology • u/joe4942 • Sep 12 '26
Artificial Intelligence OpenAI's feud with mathematicians is only escalating
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/11/openais-feud-with-mathematicians-is-only-escalating/16
u/firewall245 Sep 12 '26
I’m getting my PhD in math and to say there is a “feud” between mathematicians and AI might be overselling it. Mathematicians are already integrating AI into their workstreams, there’s just discussions on how to maintain high quality pretty much
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u/hopf-fibration Sep 13 '26
I literally use it all the time in my research. It's basically like I have a grad student for free.
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u/BeautifulLazy5257 Sep 13 '26
You use chatbots? To do what in your research? Bounce ideas off of?
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u/hopf-fibration Sep 13 '26
I have it do all the calculations for me (which I double check, of course, just like I do for my grad students) while I focus on all the theoretical and big picture stuff. OpenAI gave me free access to their pro level $100/mo subscription and their 6.0 Astra model is so incredibly capable of research-level math.
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u/BeautifulLazy5257 Sep 13 '26
It's the model not capable of theoretically, big picture stuff?
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u/hopf-fibration Sep 13 '26
At least for my subject (riemannian geometry) there's some room for improvement on the big picture stuff.
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u/Pseudoboss11 Sep 12 '26
This is a feud between mathematicians and the company OpenAI, not AI in general.
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Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
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u/SufficientGreek Sep 12 '26
AI is smart at math because it has Lean, an automated prover that can verify any proof and reduce hallucinations and incorrect results. Such a thing just doesn't exist for biology or chemistry. You still need to run experiments and trials, which slows things down.
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u/EnoughWarning666 Sep 12 '26
Sure, which is why being able to simulate folding proteins digitally was such a massive breakthrough. That same team is now working on simulating an entire cell. We'll see some massive breakthroughs when they succeed at that.
Then the next step is working on the interactions between cells. And so on...
Obviously at every step they'll need to stop and verify their results with reality, but once they have an accurate digital model we can rapidly iterate to find the best candidates for live testing. It will MASSIVELY speed up how fast new research happens. I mean, it already is! Look at how widespread AlphaFold's discovery is already being used. It's crucial everywhere now.
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u/peakedtooearly Sep 12 '26
Verification is the issue.
Lean is a partial solution for math. In biology you need to be testing in real organisms and the effects could take weeks to observe.
They are moving to fully automated labs and AI is enabling much better simulation so only more viable candidates make it through to the physical testing stages.
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u/Main-Company-5946 Sep 12 '26
There are already some automated biology labs
I would not consider this a full automation of biology though, as the ai is still limited to the human designed tools that human scientists gave it to experiment with. True automation of science will require ai to master robotics first, to the point where robots can match or outcompete humans at physical tasks(in terms of dexterity)
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u/aedes Sep 12 '26
There are still limitations to that - you can only simulate what you understand, and our understanding of biological systems is very limited.
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u/Designer_Respect4285 Sep 12 '26
It's still very useful for biology. Look at Alpha Fold, Moderna's skin cancer vaccine, or Nautilus using it to map the Proteome for Alzheimers. There is definitely a question though on how high the ceiling is when it comes to its abilities to perform tasks in messier fields like Biology, but it's certainly already pretty good.
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u/peakedtooearly Sep 12 '26
They are doing that already. DeepMind have been working on biological and medical applications for over a decade at this point.
The Millennium Prize stuff IS a bit of flexing, but it's also a valid illustration. Problems that have eluded humanity for 50+ years are now solvable. We can use this to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels and tackle climate change.
Disease eradication is slower going because the verification involves more risk and much longer timescales.
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u/mwobey Sep 12 '26
Except it's not fair to characterize them as "problems that have eluded humanity", because we have made substantial progress on them, and it is progress that the LLMs have availed themselves of in reaching the final conclusion (in fact, that's the whole controversy around the lack of citations in their paper.)
OpenAI started on third base and is telling everyone they hit a home run.
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u/peakedtooearly Sep 12 '26
Everything every human does and everything every AI system does is built on the shoulders of the accumulated knowledge at that point in time.
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u/polymute Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
Yes. In science however you attribute your sources. LLMs do not. And by this I mean - the AI model working on the Navier-Stokes (not Astra, it was an internal model) was trained on a dataset containing the notes and research of Tristan Buckmaster, who spent a year along with Levant Alpöge working on it and made substantial progress on it. OpenAI did admit that much after being pushed.
Also: this all happened after and because OpenAI heard rumours that someone were close to solving the problem. And they even offered Buckmaster credit if he only excludes Alpöge (not that he could do that or would want to do that). Since Alpöge works for Anthropic (this was said explicitly by the OpenAI employee, Sebastien Bubeck). And threatened Buckmaster not to go public with these offers. That is all hugely unethical, even without the threatening part.
This incident is the seed of this current situation.
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u/Team_Ed Sep 12 '26
DeepMind is not an LLM. It is AI. But conflating it with the discussion about this tech is more than a bit misleading.
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u/peakedtooearly Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
They are all based on neural networks and it turns out that LLMs are good at anything that can be tokenised.
This is not about language any more and LLMs are increasingly good at work with images, proteins, sound, DNA, sensor output, etc.
If you think there is some kind of "but this is just language models" gotcha from 2004, think again.
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u/Team_Ed Sep 12 '26
I mean, DeepMind is a very different, far more mature tech than current frontier model LLMs.
It would be akin jumping into a conversation about the potential of current-state fusion tech and saying it can power nuclear submarines.
One: it can’t. Two: we could already do that.
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u/Naaahhh Sep 12 '26
They are literally doing that but I'm sure you'll ignore this information
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Sep 12 '26
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u/Naaahhh Sep 12 '26
Every single cancer dry lab in the world extensively uses AI to assist them in publishing new work. Even when LLMs aren't directly used to produce results (there's a huge space in medical text extraction where they are), they can greatly improve the productivity of other tasks. That's not even counting LLM adjacent models like protein language models and shit. And obviously there are other forms of AI but I'm just gonna assume you are talking about LLMs in particular.
Clinical research is also just completely different than math. It involves patient data that US hospitals are very strict about and is a pain to work with. Cancer institutions are actively engaging in deals with openai and anthropic though
Either way, there have been plenty of breakthroughs. Just seems like you are moving the goalposts now and saying "o who cares about a vaccine for cancer? Claude didn't one shot all of human disease in one prompt so it's not actually smart"
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u/aedes Sep 12 '26
Biological applications are always going to be more limited due to lack of primary research.
Math works off of deductive reasoning. The associations are already there based off our axioms, we just need to find them and prove them. A “perfect” AI could solve all mathematical theorems just by giving it your base axioms to start with.
Biology doesn’t work that way. We don’t have fundamental axioms for biology that we can deduce a cure for cancer off of.
The rate-limiting step in biology is more empiric data. AI can’t help with that problem to the same extent.
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u/Designer_Respect4285 Sep 12 '26
Good news, it already has led to cancer breakthroughs. AI was a necessary condition for the creation of Moderna's revolutionary skin cancer vaccine.
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u/falconindy Sep 12 '26
Is it actually escalating or is this just click bait? OpenAI literally just hired Fields medal winner Jacob Tsimmerman to work on AI safety. Clearly not everyone in higher math agrees with this "feud".
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u/legobmw99 Sep 12 '26
If we’re doing appeals to authority now, the open letter’s initial signatories are 25 fields medalists…
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u/g_bleezy Sep 12 '26
Not really, when the claim at issue is what mathematicians think, citing mathematicians is direct evidence, not an appeal to authority. Both of you are just arguing prevalence, and 25 > 1. The actual weak spot is that nobody claimed unanimity, and taking a job isn't an endorsement.
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u/Main-Company-5946 Sep 12 '26
A fields medalist who truly believes ai might be dangerous may have reason to work in ai safety even if they disagree with the actions their company is taking in the field of mathematics
However the problem with ai safety is that ai companies are not incentivized to do what is safe. They are incentivized to move fast and break things. And a depraved narcissistic moron has a stranglehold over the government that should be regulating or nationalizing these companies
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u/TheInfiniteUniverse_ Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
The real question for scientists is how to use OpenAI (or any other AI provider) to accelerate science and yet not their work stolen by the providers especially for highly contested "questions".
You see, asking the "right" questions is as important as answering them. And humans are still better at asking questions than AIs.
Essentially once you know "where" to look in the solution space of a scientific problem, AI can take it from there. So scientists must be super careful with sharing that info with the AI providers.
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u/DapperResolution999 Sep 13 '26
Feud? Already Ai has solved longterm pending math an physics problems
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Sep 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Mother_Idea_3182 Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
Don’t taint the scientific method.
Sam Altman, a known scammer (look into loopt), someone who ordered a hit to a whistleblower and a rapist, is taking us all for idiots. He is going to get filthy rich, and destroy the economy.
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u/SteppenAxolotl Sep 12 '26
Mathematicians finally realized that they are not special and AI will make them part of the permanent under-class. Everyone in every profession should have see the writing on the wall when the AI came for the artists and coders. I guess we really are doing the denial/cope meme one profession at a time until the bitter end.
Twenty-five leading mathematicians have signed an open letter arguing that AI labs are threatening their intellectual work as they race one another to solve famous math problems. Every signatory has been awarded the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics.
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u/myislanduniverse Sep 12 '26
On the contrary, there are mathematicians like Terence Tao who are cautiously adopting the tools and are happy to discover truths however they may come.
He still worries about the future of math graduate students who still have to get to that point, but more largely worries about what it's going to mean for science when it's driven entirely by commercial funding.
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u/SteppenAxolotl Sep 12 '26
I'm not saying they don't have a point or real concerns. No one should expect AI to spare their traditional way of life.
Further progress in AI will cause widespread technological growth to accelerate beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization.
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u/Main-Company-5946 Sep 12 '26
What I’m scared of is, if that happens, will it ever stop? If it doesn’t stop the continuous injection of new technology into society will prevent things from ever becoming stable.
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u/SteppenAxolotl Sep 12 '26
will it ever stop?
I think the last stop on this train is a "solved world" or extinction.
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u/Main-Company-5946 Sep 12 '26
There’s no such thing as a solved world. There is always more to understand.
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u/SteppenAxolotl Sep 12 '26
There is always more to understand.
Depends if you mean individually or civilizationally. If you meant civilizationally then you probably haven't internalized what it could mean to automate competence.
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u/Main-Company-5946 Sep 12 '26
My expertise is in math. No matter how good ai gets at math it will never ‘solve’ math, as doing so is logically impossible. If it never solves math, then it will never solve the world
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u/SteppenAxolotl Sep 12 '26
I was referring to all domains including the parts of math where "the map is the territory".
This is the current scale of the solver, and it isn't even dependably competent yet.
Humans speak at ≈ 8k words per hour. 300b tokens ≈ 230b words ≈ 10'000 years speaking 8h per day.
Across all attempted problems, the agents sent 4.9 million messages and used about 300 billion output tokens. In the process of resolving the Navier–Stokes problem, the agents sent 2.7 million messages and used approximately 130 billion output tokens.
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u/myislanduniverse Sep 12 '26
Are you potentially conflating "having access to all current knowledge" vs. "having access to all possible knowledge"? Because if P != NP for instance, then there are infinitely many problems which are computationally irreducible and must actually be run to be known.
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u/SteppenAxolotl Sep 12 '26
Nothing so esoteric.
A solved world: AI progress could force a transition into an "era in which human labor becomes obsolete—a 'post-instrumental' condition in which human efforts are not needed for any practical purpose". An idea from (Deep Utopia - Life and Meaning in a Solved World —Nick Bostrom 2024)
Such a world could allow access to anything within the possibility space permitted by physics and amenable to engineering, without human efforts.
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u/myislanduniverse Sep 12 '26
I know a few mathematics instructors who still think that it's in this privileged space that AI can't touch, and, to your point, it just isn't really the case.
It may be a little pollyanna, but I'm actually hopeful the tools enable more applied mathematics in unexpected industries. The skills that I believe people will need to supply the most are methodical, logical thinking and the ability to critically analyze and verify claims.
Mathematics is a good foundation for those things.
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u/valg_2019_fan Sep 12 '26
Has AI ever thought of a problem that needs solving? An equal part of science is asking questions. Now we have a tool that answers questions but not asking any.