Topic
Use of AI systems, including large language models, to generate or verify mathematical proofs, and the resulting debate over credit and standards.
Mathematicians in a group chaired by Terence Tao are urging a boycott of OpenAI after it released more than 700 AI-generated proof files at once. At issue is whether a problem counts as solved before a human has checked and understood its proof, and who does that work.
Reality
OpenAI said on September 8 that its models had solved one of mathematics' most famous problems, setting off a dispute over authorship and proof standards. The fight now turns on whether proofs that mathematicians can barely read can be checked and credited at all.
Reality
OpenAI's louder announcement of a nine-member independent math advisory group caused widespread confusion over whether the company had appointed it. Its first job is helping release scores more results from an unreleased OpenAI model, a wave researchers already dread.
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Days after Caltech mathematicians called AI "slop mathematics" research misconduct, OpenAI's research lead said the company would stop sponsoring their competition. Organizers say they are talking to other firms.
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OpenAI says its new nine-member mathematics advisory group will not advise on the pace of its internal research, and the group's own website says the decisions rest with the AI companies.
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Buckmaster was preparing to publish when OpenAI announced it had solved the problem and offered him a share of the credit. A second mathematician, Andreas Thom, then asked the company whether his own ChatGPT conversations had reached its model.
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A week and a half after accusing OpenAI of copying his approach to a problem carrying a $1 million bounty, the NYU mathematician is still running the company's coding agent on his own papers.
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Azeem Azhar counted the raised hands himself, in a self-selected room of 250 IT executives at a Las Vegas conference. Every firm in it told him AI spending rises next year. Budgets have to answer for that.
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The declaration lands three days after OpenAI's Navier-Stokes claim, in the middle of a credit dispute where the company and the mathematician at the center give accounts that cannot both be right.
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A Caltech open letter says research mathematicians end up verifying and correcting what AI companies announce, without pay or credit. OpenAI's sponsorship was $1m in credits, and it took them back.
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Two labs put $1 million each of computing power behind a student event that asked what mathematicians are for. One has since withdrawn, and the 19-year-old who pitched it is still dealing with the objections.
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Their joint statement argues that famous open problems were only ever a proxy for understanding, and that benchmarks miss the years of talks and simplifications that follow a proof.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Tristan Buckmaster used OpenAI's Codex on the Navier-Stokes problem, then asked whether his prompts had fed the system that beat him to a proof, and the company's answer to The Verge got firmer over time.
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Tristan Buckmaster told the ABC that the game is up for mathematicians. In the same week, OpenAI described what his Codex prompts did to its models in two incompatible ways, and a customer has no way to pick between them.
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OpenAI says the run took 88 hours and cost millions, which tells a small research group more about whether it can compete than the proof itself does, and its wording on user data shows the limit of what any vendor can promise.
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Eric Lu published a 130-digit factor of RSA-260. Anyone can confirm it divides evenly. The method behind it is still undescribed, and that method is the part that would say anything about deployed key sizes.
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Anthropic published two AI-derived cryptanalysis results in July and OpenAI's model disproved an 80-year-old conjecture in May, but both authors argue the models are still weak exactly where deep new theory is required.
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