It’s always frustrating to listen to people on HN and X, the everything app, talk about this with that characteristic smugness. “It’s totally understandable that they feel this way” “oh people still play chess!” As if what mathematicians are upset at “losing” an arbitrary strategy game. It’s a very childish way to interact with it but you can’t expect much I guess.

I like this website though because it collects a lot of the important frustrations from the mathematical community, these open problems were curated in order to organize a field around, most to all of them only have/had value in so far as they promoted study of the subject. The claim that AI proofs will open new frontiers for mathematics research could probably be true but misses the point that the manner OpenAI has gone about their “contribution” does more to cauterize the field than promote anything productive. OpenAI is functionally reducing the communities ability to ask real questions. Math is ultimately a very different field from the rest of the natural sciences, and I suspect a lot of the more simple discussion on this subject misses the objections because of those differences. All this to say, I don’t know that OpenAI is doing these haphazard releases cynically, with the assurance that all that matters is the headline, but it really does feel that way right now.