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points by pfdietz 2 days ago | 0 comments

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 20 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.