This is not a problem unique to the mathematical community.

What about software developer community? AI has eliminated the need for junior software engineers. Almost no one is hiring junior software engineers. But companies still need senior software engineers. Without junior engineers how will there be senior software engineers in the future?

What is the solution? I don't think the solution is to say AI progress in software, mathematics etc. should be halted.

OpenAI: "Here are the answers to every math problem. Now mathematicians are obsolete. Just send the prize money and prestige to Sam Altman. BTW gonna need some mathematicians to check these answers."

The post says that the person found these issues using an LLM as a verifier so I don't know how involved the community aspect is here

> Without a thriving mathematical community to point out these things it would have stayed broken.

And that's a bad thing. If the math community didn't exist or was weak, OpenAI would still benefit from the prestige of these results they were forced to withdraw. Withdrawing these papers has harmed OpenAI's investors, and that's totally unacceptable.

> With automated math that community as tao pointed out is at risk.

Good to hear. The problem they represent needs to be eliminated.

Have you got a link to someone pointing it out? It looks like they're still going through formal proofs so likely found the problems that way.

Without mathematicians, nobody can read the abstracts of the vibe-papers they have published anyway. They are more or less meaningless in this form.

It would have stayed broken assuming AI models never improve.

Is math a thriving community?

You do not know whether pointing a model at the paper and asking to check the proof would not eventually also find the error.

The fact that humans are needed to correct mistakes is only an ephemeral status quo that is being eroded away as we speak. We all can see it happening in front of our very eyes. AI is getting better.

It is pointless to call out the little wins humans still have because again, those wins are temporary.

We need real concerted effort into asking: what is the point? For me the only answer I came up with is: fun.

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> With automated math that community as tao pointed out is at risk.

If they can be automated, they are not necessary. If they are necessary, they won't be fully automated. It's a pretty simple experiment to run, the math "community" should bear with us. Darwin would be proud.

I'm sorry but you don't actually need the mathematical community to check any of this. You just need autonomous verification, which already exists at scale and speed vastly beyond the entire human mathematical establishment. OpenAI simply rushed these out without completing that for every paper. These mistakes have nothing at all to do with the mathematical community and are 100% just the result of market pressure incentivizing speed at 1,000,000x the pace of human mathematicians. Frankly, a couple mistakes, trivially found not by humans but by humans using AI, is almost completely irrelevant. Human mathematicians have essentially nothing to contribute to this effort aside from prompting verification agents, which any of us can do if we cared to spend the time (most of us don't).

It's amazing that people long long ago figured out so much math.

Is the risk here like "people will fund math research less because of AI"? I agree that would be bad, and we should try and stop it (along with e.g. funding for the humanities, which is in a much worse place than math!), but I'm not sure OpenAI are the right people to be mad at.