Part of The Rogue AI Crisis · 14 stories · since Sep 22 · newest 8h ago
OpenAI's 722-paper math dump splits mathematicians, forces retractionsMathematicians call the drop 'breathtaking' and 'pure insanity'
6 Oct 9 12:50 PM · 4d ago · 4 articles · 14 posts · 44 comments · 7 sources · development 6 of 7
The New York Times and The Verge surveyed dozens of mathematicians who described the flood of results as staggering and said it would take years to separate genuine solutions from unreliable output, with careers upended overnight.
“"Staggering." "Overwhelming." "Unprecedented." "Surreal." "Pure insanity."”
mathematicians, quoted by The VergeOpenAI Releasing labAssociation for Human Mathematics Mathematicians' advocacy groupTerence Tao Mathematician
Zvi Mowshowitz Independent AI analyst / blogger
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What was reported 1 claim about this development
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first by Mastodon, 4d ago · also The Verge
What people said 24 voices · best of 51 · verbatim
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NYU math professor Tristan Buckmaster says OpenAI’s Tuesday drop of 722 AI-generated math papers wiped out entire research programs: “This recent dump of papers on Tuesday destroyed the careers of early career mathematicians.”
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"Hundreds of new A.I.-generated findings moved the frontiers of higher math in a single day — dispelling any doubt that the field is forever changed." https://www. nytimes.com/2026/10/08/science /mathematicians-respond-openai-release.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HVE.c71Z.n4i4gtqHvSqb&smid=nytcore-ios-share
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1791446821 | OpenAI withdraws three of their recent manuscripts | https://github.com/openai/math/pull/1/files/301488868beec11b... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50003100 | 1 comment1791446917 | OpenAI Withdraws 3 Math Papers | https://github.com/openai/math/blob/main/history.md | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50003107 | 118…
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OpenAI just unveiled a series of major breakthroughs in mathematics. Imagine spending four years mastering how to make fire by rubbing sticks together, only for the lighter to be invented the day you graduate. That's probably how math graduates feel right now. 😂
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https:// winbuzzer.com/2026/10/09/opena i-shares-hundreds-of-math-results-from-an-unreleased-ai-xcxwbn/ OpenAI has published 722 manuscripts of proposed mathematical solutions from an unreleased AI model, giving researchers new work to examine. # AI # OpenAI # Math # AIMath # Research
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I think it can both true that 1) OpenAI is being inconsiderate/harmful/<pick-whatever-adjective> with their math releases, and 2) there is now a treasure trove of mathematical results ready for the taking.Yes, the situation sucks overall and mathematics as a whole is in a turbulent time now.But it also sucks when mathematicians, who are considered…
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"If this was real attempt to share progress, the quality of the writing would be better, it would receive some input from actual experts on the actual topic. OpenAI is a busy company, but I am sure that if they want to be genuinely helpful, they can find the time to contact a few mathematicians for advice and input, if nothing else, then on the…
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Let us not forget that there's much more to this than just OpenAI being lazy and incompetent and willingly ignoring the high standards that researchers usually holds themselves to.There's also the case of ethical violations, straight up scientific misconduct, as when OpenAI steals results of others (their customers) and present them as their…
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"Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power. " ___ AHM Statement on OpenAI’s October 6 Release of Mathematical Documents https://www. ahmath.org/statements # resistIAGen
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> But it also sucks when mathematicians, who are considered experts on a particular problem, refuse to engage with breakthrough results about that problem.For me the problem is that rigth now the structure of incentives that has been built (e.g. you publish more = you get a grant; good exposition < solving a conjecture) is now broken. So, for…
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I think people sometimes overestimate what proving something means. For example the 4 color problem was a computer assisted proof from a long time ago. I doubt that many people actually read the proof even though leafing through the book is kind of fun if you can find a copy. Another example is the Kepler conjecture on sphere packing. The peer…
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>That's not what you'd expect from a serious preprint claiming to solve a problem....>It seems to me, that the AI tech companies would like us to conform to their standards, rather than spend the time and energy to conform to ours.The entire argument is ugly and unfamiliar methods are used, and nobody's got time to drop everything and understand…
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If there is a formal proof, and it is the proof of your precise statement (which I imagine is easy to check, otherwise I think that mathematicians would not accept the Navier Stokes result so quickly), then there is no way to ignore the result, however badly it is written.This was always the essence of mathematics, and it must stay this way.As…
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The response by some in the field of mathematics to this repo is ... I guess not unexpected; but it's quite disappointing.I sympathize with those who've worked on some problem for years and now don't have something to work on; it's been a part of their identity. I also especially sympathize with those whose career tracks and plans were thrown in…
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"not at the Lean code, since I know very little of the actual usage of Lean, and that code was enormous"This part I don't understand. Not that anyone should read the entire Lean code of any proof, but if the statement of the theorem to be proven in lean seems to be correct, then I would think there would be at least some interest if in fact there…
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Paraphrasing Hardy, 'exposition is for second-rate minds'.I don't believe this myself. But I do believe that if you've formed your very ideas about what is good and desirable on the basis of a culture that has held certain values dear for hundreds of years, and have fought against every doubt and difficulty in life for decades to mold yourself…
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I agree, and I disagree. There are plenty of published mathematical papers that are just as poorly written as OpenAI's. Nobody says nothing because the authors are big names. In some cases, the proofs are not even correct, but everybody has a feeling the result are true nonetheless, so they pretend not to see it. So I agree that OpenAI should have…
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It’s fine to dislike AI slop and not engage with it. But I would claim there is a difference between a human submitting a sloppy paper to a journal vs producing one with AI. The former is lazy and unprofessional, the latter is an interesting experiment. I appreciate not wanting to engage in an experiment you didn’t sign up for, but therein lies…
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At first I thought this was going to be more Luddite babble, but it makes a good point. OpenAI isn't contributing if they are make unreadable papers. They should use a little more of their compute to nail interpretability. The difficulty will only get worse as AI plow deeper into the frontier and produce increasingly alien looking output. I…
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The problem here is that while you can call what OpenAI does "mathematics", I would hesitate to call it science. Science as a process of acquiring and developing knowledge within a domain involves a lot more than just dumping unfinished work on the scientific community. Among other things, it involves developing frameworks and understanding of the…
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> Wait, what you are doing here doesn't really make sense, there exists a much more elegant abstraction that nobody has thought of, let's remove all that code, let's tackle the problem in a different way by thinking from first principles. Pretty much never.Uh, quite often for me. I explain the problem and my thoughts on the solution and it tells…
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> Indeed, at least two people asked if I plan on sending Sam Altman a bottle of whisky, as promised in my Problems page. The answer to that is no. And let me explain to you why> I took a brief look at the preprint released by OpenAI. It sucked. It is unclear, muddled, and has a strange structure.
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I can't relate to this at all. AI models will surely get better at writing "enjoyable proofs," but for now the situation is what it is. You're passionate about this problem, right? But you don't want to do the work to understand the result? Fine. There's a new generation of younger, hungry mathematicians that are highly interested in figuring out…
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Why are you two-siding this. There is only one misaligned agent here and that is the company OpenAI. What OpenAI is doing sucks, and people are calling OpenAI out for sucking. However mathematicians (the main victims of OpenAI’s lousy behavior) behave is not the issue here.If some mathematicians complain about OpenAI sucking, that is fine…
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