OpenAI posts 700 maths preprints online: mathematicians are up in arms

The research community is in uproar after OpenAI released a trove of more than 700 mathematical preprints entirely generated by AI on 6 October. The San Francisco, California-based maker of ChatGPT posted the preprints on the software repository Github.

Although some mathematicians celebrated the solution of longstanding problems, others took to social media to complain about being scooped. Some were incensed at what one physicist called a ‘slopocalypse’, even if the mathematical content could end up being formally correct.

www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03196-8

I saw the Wired article yesterday, it’s worse than it sounds.

For at least one of the problems an OpneAI researcher initiated a partnership with a mathametician, loaded all of his work into a chatbot without his knowledge, and then published the result as 100% from the chatbot in this “trove”.

When the mathematician confronted the OpenAI employee, he was told sharing credit was “too complicated” so they wouldn’t acknowledge he had already mostly had it done. When he tried to push back, OpenAI then threatened his career if he tried to tell people what had happened.

It’s is very very unlikely that was a single case. If that happened once, they definitely at least tried it more than once.

Even if it actually solved anything, taking in years of human work and then spitting out one last step is nowhere near what they’re portraying this as. They’re intentionally making it sound like they just gave the chat or the problem and it solved what a human couldn’t.

All it did was steal human work and rush publication

Solving math proofs with AI is like doing art with AI. Pointless. In fact, it is detrimental to the discipline as a whole, because doing so means people will stop sharing work and insights with each other, which has never been the case before (at least it’s not the norm).

As discussed on MathandAI.org and elsewhere, top mathematicians “disseminate ideas in talks, private discussions and careful writeups, connecting them to the previous ideas of others. These processes invariably take time and are based on human interaction.”

AI is undermining this process, as people naturally become less willing to discuss ideas that can easily be stolen.

I don’t know what you’re trying to say, and I feel like you don’t either.

This means people will stop sharing work and insights with each other, which has never before been the case.

That part was clearly, but obviously false on multiple levels

I’m actually paraphrasing Terence Tao and some of the top mathematicians on the planet. These discussions have been prevalent across the maths community.

It’s not common knowledge, but mathematical proofs aren’t intrinsically valuable (in any way whatsoever) outside of the mathematical community capable of deriving them. They are valuable because they create a mathematical community, not the other way around.

Scientific discoveries are different. Scientific insights without scientists are still useful to society. Not so mathematical proofs without mathematicians.