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points by rickdeckard 2 days ago | 0 comments

> "This stuff reads as cope by scientists who spent their entire careers chasing these problems."

This seems to be really hard for some people to understand:

The gripe is not how AI has "cheated" and wasn't "embracing the race", everyone agrees that it's the result that counts.

The problem is that researchers use AI as a tool, and the company owning the tool siphoned all data from the sum of all researchers, combined it and completed the research. Okay, result is reached, still arguably good.

But the company owning the tool now takes credit for the entire research.

"Inviting" selected researchers to be mentioned in the press-release is not fixing that, the entire body of work is actually based on what the sum of researchers did, even those who failed in their research and didn't publish anything.

[–] pfdietz 2 days ago

This sort of argument becomes increasingly ludicrous with time. It requires that all sorts of results were made unknowingly by mathematicians but they somehow didn't realize it. It's actually a stunning indictment of mathematicians.

No, what is happening is that the AI is really good at connecting the dots and human mathematicians aren't.

OpenAI is explicitly not taking credit, btw.

[–] peddling-brink 2 days ago

Go ahead and send me your work outputs in real time. If I finish your work before you, I might give you partial credit.

[–] p-e-w 2 days ago

So there were mathematicians who would have solved Navier-Stokes, Quasi-Riemann, and ETH, if only AI hadn’t snatched away and finished off their work they were just wrapping up?

People will be getting second-hand embarrassment when they read these comments in the future.

[–] peddling-brink 2 days ago

You seem to be coming from the position that the benevolent, independently thinking, fully aligned AI has graced humanity with a forever gift. But actually it's a privately owned company, built on the collective of human intelligence, apparently stealing from active research and blessing a small few with partial credit.

There are ways to do what they are doing ethically. But this isn't it.

[–] bigbadfeline 2 days ago

Indeed, all credit should belong to the human researchers who collected the facts and traced the way.

However, with an eye on private AI as a business desperate for attention and profits, the only way out of this is to build open source research AI - better than anything the closed frontiers have to offer. It should be under the full control of the people who use it and trained to support the accepted ethics and citation discipline.

[–] jacquesm 2 days ago

True, but then the 'closed source' research AI company will do what they just did: siphon up all your research, add a bit of their own and beat you at your own game. You can't win this by playing by the rules, they are using a different set of rules and with an entirely different level of funding. Think about it: the amount of money and compute they have at their disposal is larger than that that of all universities combined.

[–] whoanoway 2 days ago

> trained to support the accepted ethics

This ought to be good. Please share. Be specific.

https://tenor.com/en-CA/view/eating-popcorn-deer-hungry-yum-...

[–] drdec 2 days ago

The point is that no human had access to the same data, because the LLM used the unpublished work of a number of mathematicians. The only way for a human to gain access to the same work, i.e. the same dots to connect, is to be in active collaboration with those mathematicians. In which case they would all be included in the resulting paper.

[–] pfdietz 21 hours ago

> No, what is happening is that the AI is really good at connecting the dots and human mathematicians aren't.

I watched a Zoom presentation yesterday {10/28/2026) at Courant by Maksym Radziwill on the QRH result with the constant 11/12. It used four known ideas, but linked them together in a way that mathematicians had steered themselves away from. He gave a short sentence with four phrases that he said, if they had been sent to him by time machine, would have let him work out the proof years ago. All the details were straightforward once that high level plan was in place.

The advantage AI had here was, in his words, it lacks psychology. Humans had a prejudice that a certain approach would not be fruitful, but the AI didn't have that. The AI could explore superficially unproductive avenues at great depth, not having to do as much pruning to conserve mental effort. And as it turned out one of those approaches worked.

AI is going to fill in a lot of blind spots, I think.

[–] palata 2 days ago

> It requires that

It does not. It's more like if all those researchers had been "labelling" stuff for the AI, so that the AI can now solve those problems. But they were not paid by the AI company for their "labelling" work, and they never agreed to "label" anything in the first place.

[–] leereeves 2 days ago

> It requires that all sorts of results were made unknowingly by mathematicians but they somehow didn't realize it.

It only requires that several different mathematicians knowingly found partial results but weren't aware of the results made by other mathematicians.

[–] cheesemonk66 2 days ago

In that case, I'm glad AI could so handily improve collaboration for frontier mathematics. Progress should not be held back by a lack of willingness or ability to cooperate.

[–] wholinator2 2 days ago

Processing results takes time. Sometimes months or years. They can meet up at conferences to discuss, publish their partial results, and the mathematics community can come together to understand and piece the true answer together. None of this requires crotchety old men hoarding results, trust me, those people are smart enough not to put that in AI. They made a small result that is highly likely dependent on some input they made to the AI. The AI collates everyone's work and puts the cherry(s) on top to finalize it. Of course there is work done by the AI that only requires the sum of public human knowledge as well. But you seem very angry and accusatory at researchers, like they're some secretive cabal hoarding gold, furious at the new "give everyone our gold" machine. The people that do this science literally live for sharing and speaking and disseminating this knowledge.

Have you every used AI for work on truly cutting edge at least graduate level academic research? It's nothing like writing software, i do both professionally. Every model I've had access to requires a LOT of hand holding to get it to do the right thing. No model is getting set up with a single prompt, told to go, and then solving a millennium problem (unless they've explicitly stated that, which i would still doubt). It takes a lot of guidance to get these AIs to solve any serious problem. It's not outside at least my reach to believe that openAI is taking these nudges from intelligent people and combining those with the internal, non public models to make great press releases as it tumbled towards an infinite debt wall. I don't think there's a thing they wouldn't do to save their company.

[–] MINECRAFT_BIOLO 2 days ago

I think you're wrong, looks like models are just finding and writing up publishable papers on novel results now just by giving them a single prompt and telling them to do so.

Preprint link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.33179

Author's post on LinkedIn with details: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/christopher-herzog-a2985229a_...

Prompt to GPT-5.6 Sol:

"I would like you to write for me a short article that could be published in Physical Review Letters. I would like you to choose the question, do the analysis and write up the results. The constraints I put on the question are 1) that it should be in the hep-th set of topics (so that I have a hope of evaluating the arguments and results); 2) the answer can be written up in a short format of 5 pages or less; 3) the result is of significance enough that it can be published in PRL. I want to break up the task into several steps. The first is to find a good question, so give me three candidates. I’m also going to involve Claude in the process. Claude is going to find three candidates too, and the next step will be to evaluate each others’ candidate questions."

[–] leereeves 2 days ago

Is it really "collaboration" if someone takes results discovered by other people and uses them without acknowledgement?

[–] jatora 2 days ago

It's more collaboration than what was happening before, if all you care about is the knowledge, not the accolades.

[–] leereeves 2 days ago

The accolades matter for more than pride; they lead to money that funds more work.

[–] pfdietz 2 days ago

I think part of what's getting the goat of some mathematicians is not that OpenAI is getting results, but that OpenAI is telling mathematicians that priority isn't something they care about. The indifference is more threatening to the current traditions of math than if they were actually fighting for priority. The indifference gets reinterpreted as them trying to "steal glory" but that's not what they're doing. They're bulldozing glory.

[–] KoolKat23 2 days ago

Well I guess it's time the mathematics business model is updated.

[–] m3kw9 2 days ago

I like you point but OpenAI may know a lot more than how traditional mathematians know about others work

[–] phkahler 2 days ago

>> OpenAI is explicitly not taking credit, btw.

We have a big announcement! But we are not taking credit.

We or organizing all these people to figure out how to process our latest fabulous output. But we didn't do anything? Nope, no credit here.

[–] armchairhacker 2 days ago

> But the company owning the tool now takes credit for the entire research.

They didn't take full credit for Navier-Stokes; unless I'm mistaken, they're letting the researchers who almost solved it have first authorship on the "official" paper, which the researchers are writing to have a human-readable breakdown of the AI's proof, and OpenAI has announced.

If anyone was close to solving the Exponential Time problem, they could come out and claim so, and they would be taken seriously; and if they have any evidence in ChatGPT logs, I expect OpenAI would announce an official explanation paper with their name on it. Credit is cheap: ChatGPT does get some credit because it did make the final leap, that doesn't mean researchers don't.

[–] laggyluke 2 days ago

> the entire body of work is actually based on what the sum of researchers did, even those who failed in their research and didn't publish anything.

I don't really see how this is significantly different from them scraping the entire human knowledge, distilling it into weights and then selling the results.

Sure, this argument is about the _new_ data that researchers feed into the machine voluntarily, but I don't see this distinction as significant.

Not making a moral judgement here, just stating that this is consistent with the way those companies operate in general.

[–] rickdeckard 2 days ago

> "I don't really see how this is significantly different from them scraping the entire human knowledge, distilling it into weights and then selling the results."

Well, so far those companies offered this distilled human knowledge as part of a service, with all the (unresolved) criticism associated with scraping of other peoples properties.

In this instance they did the next step, created a combined output and are celebrating themselves for the result, inviting others to join.

It's the difference of scraping all books to build a language model from it for sale to others, and outright announcing a new Harry Potter book after extending an offer to JK Rowling to join the press-release.

(and I guess I need to clarify: I don't compare scientific research to writing a novel, I compare the handling of both scenarios)

[–] teleforce 2 days ago

Am I missing something, if you a paid subscriber, LLM service providers OpenAI/Google/etc by default will not trained on your input data unless explicitly allowed by the users.

If this is not enabled by default then it need to be the default policy within EU by the enforcement of GPDR, for example.

[–] bebimbop 1 day ago

> everyone agrees that it's the result that counts.

I don't know if I agree with that. That presumes that the entire point of mathematics is to produce results. I don't believe that at all.

I believe that the entire point of mathematics is to produce human understanding and mental models that are useful or beautiful to humans. (I also believe there's a mysteriously deep connection between those two notions, but that's a different discussion.)

At any rate, I think that the old process, where humans had to cut the paths themselves before the clearing emerged, is one that led to understanding first, then a distilled result. And then the secondary task of distilling the understanding down to a clean proof is the icing on the cake. Some mathematicians are very good at keeping the intuition and understanding clear when presenting proofs. Some are not.

However, very often, the end result and proof is not where the real understanding lies, and that is one of the reasons why mathematics has been such a social endeavor. Often you can't glean the "hidden truths" behind austere proofs before you engage with people who can help you see the picture behind it. Many people who went through Baby Rudin as an undergrad can maybe relate to what I'm saying here. For a very insightful analysis about how intuition and discourse lead the discovery of mathematical truth, I highly recommend Imre Lakatos' amazing book "Proofs and Refutations."

What the models are producing is not what we had before. They are producing the cargo cult equivalent: Equations and words on paper which by means of tracing through the steps might take you from A to B. And after a while, humans might discover the true facts behind why that path from A to B exists, and then understanding emerges. And only then.

But when the process is done through AI, no one (no human) learns how to make discoveries and connections on their own. We are not letting people exercise the cognitive apparatus which is used to gain intuition and understanding. My fear is that after a while, fewer human mathematicians are able to gain the understanding mathematicians before them did.

It's as if someone removed all the barbells from a gym and made automated hydraulic jacks do all the lifting. After a while, people would wonder why our power lifters aren't as strong anymore. "But weights get lifted! That's the entire point, right?!"

[–] lioeters 1 day ago

Thanks for the recommendation!

Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery - Imre Lakatos

I appreciated your defense of mathematics as a communal process of developing human understanding, not just a way to solve problems and generate proofs. While the latter is important and valuable, replacing mathematicians on an industrial scale will destroy the cultural context that cultivated the field over generations.

[–] phatfish 2 days ago

This sort of action is the only way other countries will take the dependency on US controlled services seriously.

Keep screwing over scientists, please OpenAI, eventually it will wake up the lazy institutions in Europe (and other places).

If they just stand by and let it happen, they deserve to be made fools of.

[–] Difwif 2 days ago

The models will be leap frogging themselves with zero human input far before Europe wakes up.

[–] hardbass 2 days ago

The chinese will be speedrunning their science using full ai, yes.

[–] elif 2 days ago

Humans and their need for gold star stickers

[–] shermantanktop 2 days ago

Would you do this work but not expect credit for your progress? Especially if your career depended on it?

Not many people create things and refuse to sign them, and believe in anonymous contributions to humanity. I’ve had coworkers present my work uncredited with the implication that it was theirs. Not many people would be fine with that.

There are a few, but not many. Suggests to me that what you call “gold stickers are actually important.

[–] BenzeneDream 1 day ago

You actually think recent chats were used in training of these models to THEN complete the proofs? This seems incredibly far-fetched and almost impossible based on how LLMs train. Occam's Razor says that simply the models are getting increasingly more capable in these domains.