alt Hacker News'Breathtaking,' 'Devastating': Mathematics Reels After New OpenAI Release
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Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/science/mathematicians-re...
>If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked.
- Alex Kontorovich, chair of the department of mathematics at Rutgers
I wonder how many chat logs they did use in model's training data? If model consumes human’s reasoning (the chat logs) and then presents results as its own, it's a kind of parasite right?
Harvesting collective output of human consciousness to build AI that then replaces the very people who provided the input.
> Initially, the rumors about these OpenAI results had it that there were solutions to 400 problems, and now the rumors are that further dumps are arriving soon.
That is mental if true. Though if once again most of them will lack a Lean proof, bit hard to feel confident about their correctness. They might trust their model, but given the community impressions on manuscript prose quality, I have a hard time imagining they are any better than its coding output, where closed loop verification continues to be essential. OpenAI might have great trust in their internal model, but this seems like a needlessly hazardous way test that trust out. The optics of those retracted papers from a few days ago were bad enough already.
I have separately heard of efforts regarding Lean proof optimization. Since it's all self machine checkable, might be valuable to do before a release like this too. I'd imagine a shorter Lean proof means a shorter manuscript too.
While I see lots of discussion about AI solving these problems, I feel like there's a more sinister undercurrent that's is less discussed - about who did the solving. It wasn't academics empowered by AI, but OpenAI themselves.
I feel like it's a sign of what's to come - large AI companies with resources academia never had, at some point deciding that selling access to AI is not as important as just doing the research themselves with models inaccessible to anyone else. The end game is all scientific advancement will be done by one or two companies, who will reap all the profits. Why would they give access to a model that develops a cure for cancer when they could develop the cure themselves and get all the money?
(Kind of like Amazon coming out with their own products - use the greater community for ideas, then become a competitor at a scale they often cannot match).