Part of The Rogue AI Crisis · 14 stories · since Sep 22 · newest 8h ago
OpenAI's 722-paper math dump splits mathematicians, forces retractionsTerence Tao publishes his response to the OpenAI math drop
3 Oct 8 1:14 AM · 5d ago · 9 articles · 11 posts · 24 comments · 6 sources · development 3 of 7
Prominent mathematician Terence Tao posted his own assessment of the release on Mathstodon, becoming a reference point for how the field should weigh the results.
“Mathematicians are coping so hard. Suddenly they can not stand AI. 😀 the guild is so badly protecting its turf.”
@rohanpaul_ai, X/Twitter user · x ↗OpenAI Releasing labAssociation for Human Mathematics Mathematicians' advocacy groupTerence Tao Mathematician
Zvi Mowshowitz Independent AI analyst / blogger
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What was reported 2 claims about this development
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first by Scientific American, 5d ago
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first by HN Frontpage, 5d ago
What people said 24 voices · best of 26 · verbatim
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Mathematicians are coping so hard. Suddenly they can not stand AI. 😀 the guild is so badly protecting its turf. The Association for Human Mathematics (AHM), criticised OpenAI's yesterday's release of 722 math manuscripts and urged mathematicians "to discontinue their work with
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1, 2 —> 4: My point is that despite all the public (and not-public) source code and docs that it’s trained on; despite me including it as part of the basic guard rails / prompt instruction for all work; and despite specifically calling out those same compliance requirements in the exact prompt session that is meant to handle those compliance…
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The same could be said of Software. Instead of giving up on creating novel projects and instead just taking other peoples ideas and porting them to Rust, we could be embracing AI to push software and computers farther.Im not sure how that will work, but im convinced the current paradigm of just pushing agents into codebases for not much reason…
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OpenAI said it solved 300+ complicated math problems, mathematicians are livid https://www. morningbrew.com/stories/openai -math-problems-mathematicians-are-livid?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub Posted into Morning Brew @ morning-brew-Insider
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God are people this dense these days to not understand the issue with OpenAI's recent slop granade? I was checking one of the papers there on the scale to conformal invariance in 4D QFT and there couldn't be anything less interesting. Start with an assumption so strong that it has the solution practically embedded in it lol. So what do we learn…
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A very balanced perspective, and the concerns he raises are reasonable. He acknowledges that AI is going to transform mathematics, but simply dumping proofs on the math community and expecting others to do the grunt work of verifying, refining, and expanding on them is hardly a productive way to advance the field.There seems to be more interest in…
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Its not a matter of bugs. To use lean you have to translate a natural language statement in math into code. Its this transcription that is generally the source of "errors". Again, this doesn't mean that Lean is wrong. It just isn't always proving what you think it is. Seeing as the people at OpenAI don't even understand the problems they are…
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>the mere knowledge that a solution exists "contaminates" efforts by both humans and AI to find alternate routes to the problem that reveal additional insightsThis really expresses the heartburn you see across all fields, not exclusive to careerism. I certainly have friends in decomp and fan translation spaces that have been demotivated by the…
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These AI solutions provide the answer, but not the know-hows to get there. Etablished math professors might not be affected, but PhD candidates and young resesrchers who are only in the early stage of their career will have to rethink about their career choice. Pure mathematics is already pretty niche, and AI will undoubtedly shrink the talent…
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Even when a problem got solved, there has always been value in publishing simpler proofs and corollaries that give better intuition into the broader field.If I understand Tao correctly, he's saying that's going to have to be the focus going forward. I just default to thinking the models are going to be much better than us at that, too.
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I doubt Idiocracy was a wild idea, it's the idea of someone who can see things coming. When no one knows anything, you're dependent, and that means you'll be a slave. Some people will just keep their skills and a small number will teach those who want to be the survivors of the tech bros. If you can't see the problem coming, you'll certainly be a…
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How do the open AI folks know this is all right? The LLM said so? They have mathematicians?
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China's models are already open-weight. The bottleneck lies in accessing computing resources, not in the models themselves. While I'm not a mathematician, in other academic fields, not all problems hold the same significance. Some are so fundamental that they can overturn decades of established theories, while others are less impactful.
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Majority of research level math is "pure" math. Only a small minority is "applied" math. For example Hardy has a famous quote about him not doing anything useful and he takes pride in it as this was slightly after WW2 where people saw what harm science can do. He also argued for this in his famous "A Mathematician's Apology".
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If you guys followed what the mathematics community is actually doing and not demonizing them you would know thats where the discussions of the Navier Stokes results are at right now. It's not clear that the proof is actually answering the same question.
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Lean verifications aren't enough on their own either. The proper term for lean is that it is a PROOF ASSISTANT. It is not peer review. They have been shown to generate "correct" logic that didn't actually translate the problem correctly.
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And Hardy was provably absolutely wrong because the number theory he considered useless is now used in the tiny irrelevant invention called a computer.
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Nah. They CLAIMED to solve 722 problems. Peer review is part of what makes something solved and until the slop is written better thats not happening.
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Many are lean verified bro. And not even Astra ever claims it solved a problem it didn’t
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The only example I’ve seen of this is a bug in lean that was intentionally used to make a false statement and has since been fixed
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Apologies for solving open problems that mathematicians have been struggling with for decades. It will happen again.
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Sort of think - Tao's J space. :D What is the thing he is not saying out loud. What makes his output be what it is.
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I didn’t hear any complaints when Ramanujan was solving math without providing adequate citations
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Give one example of this happening with any model released in the past 6 months. Just one
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