alt Hacker NewsI 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 experts on a particular problem, refuse to engage with breakthrough results about that problem. #2 above is still true regardless of where it came from or how hard it can be to absorb.
While reading "The Mathocalypse" post [0] by Scott Aaronson, Scott described his wife Dana's reaction to one of the newly solved results in her primary domain of expertise, on which she'd been working for decades.
After her initial shock, and annoyance with the format/style, she decided to start using Astra - for the first time - to help her understand the new result. And he reported in the comments that she had made a lot of progress understanding it in one day, and may be even excited to give a talk about it!
That seems like a much healthier attitude towards these new results.
Yes, everything else sucks about this messy period. But there are still diamonds (in the rough) in this drop that perhaps should be looked into. If the author is too busy, perhaps one of their students can take a look? Someone will, eventually.
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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.
It might be a shock for you but they are very few in numbers. Most of researchers I know are always busy with something. They cannot just drop other responsibilities for something like this. They will take their own time getting through the proofs (if they want to).
> That seems like a much healthier attitude towards these new results.
Another thing to consider is not all mathematicians are from US or with good funding. The PI or graduate students cannot afford to pay 200/month.
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 into that image, that it does not 'suck' that you are unable to adapt to a new reality overnight.
Very few people that would love to be craftsmen would love to be factory foremen. It is far too insensitive to the human experience to expect people to just deal.
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 reviewers said they couldn't vouche for its correctness. While reviewers are volunteers with busy schedules, a lack of interest surely was part of the issue. This motivated Hales to formaly check his own proof (Gonthier formalized the four color problem earlier). But you can be sure that no one had been waiting for the Kepler conjecture to be proved in order to pack their spheres. Otoh, at the opposite extreme, the proof of FLT greatly advanced the field because the modularity theorem behind Wiles' proof is at the heart of a great section of math theory.
> there are still diamonds (in the rough) in this drop that perhaps should be looked into.
Right, and for some reason that "trillion dollar" company with mathematicians on staff didn't "look into" their own results. Almost like they don't care about engaging with the actual community they're dumping on.
> Part of me would like a little longer in the world where the problem is still open and I am still looking for its solution. But reaching a summit, even by someone else’s route, comes with a view. From here I can see new mountains, and I look forward to climbing them with my students, collaborators and the machines.
> 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 instance, you would be very irresponsible if you throw your student into one of those AI papers, it's too much the risk. This part is mathematician's responsability, they need to change this incentives structure.
In any case, OpenAI is being a dickhead here. They throw millions of dollars at these problems, but they can't afford basic literature reviews (the drafts barely cite previous work)? Or checking that Lean's formalizations really correspond to what they claim to prove (even for Navier-Stokes they made this mistake)? It's obvious that for them this is just a PR stunt.
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 actually, and if others are more “mature” about it, that that is fine too. Neither of these reactions should be at put as an equivalence to the blame OpenAI deserves for this stunt.
I think eventually there will be sort of a centralized more or less automated repository for ingesting and sorting ai-generated lean proofs and making them searchable and re-usable. On some level it kind of doesn't matter if mathematicians can ingest the results, if coding agents can just search for them online and use them in their own proofs.
I actually think it would be very smart for the big AI labs to get together to fund an independent organization to manage such a thing, and hire mathematicians to run it.
What is happening now is that some aspects of mathematics are turning into essentially an exercise in software engineering. It is well known that proofs and computer programs have an isomorphism, and I think the eventual merger is more or less inevitable.
That's not to say that there isn't an infinite amount of work remaining for mathematicians to do. There are only so many problems that are going to be amenable to this approach.
>Yes, the situation sucks overall
No it doesn't. Hundreds of open problems in a STEM field getting solved at once does not suck at all.
You would have to be deeply jaded and cynical to conclude that.
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 own.
One particularly bad one came yesterday: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10072
> The result is also contained in a paper [8] released by OpenAI on October 6, 2026, in which the proof strategy and specific choices of notation are identical to a preliminary version of the present paper that was uploaded to ChatGPT on September 8, 2026.
Of course it's hard to say what to make of that without knowing what exactly went into the machine, but it certainly looks bad. And there's obviously a non-zero probability that it is indeed another instance of plagiarism, given that that's how they operate.
In this case, the author is a grad student, so what we're looking at is a company willing to steal from a student, ignoring whatever impact that could have on their career prospects, for a tiny piece of marketing material.