100+ reactions to 100+ solutions

  >The advent of AI was always going to be a seismic shock, but this huge dump of papers is a tsunami that we have no time to prepare for. It’s clear that OpenAI will happily wash away our community’s structures to further their financial interests.

What is the alternative?

1. Don't do the research internally (except someone else will do it once the model is public)?

2. Do the research internally but wait longer before telling anyone (this is what OpenAI did before, and mathematicians explicitly told them don't do it)?

3. Don't develop better models at all (except that Chinese models are only a few months behind)?

None of the options available to OpenAI would seem to solve the above concerns.

  >Let mathematicians do the AI-supported research on their own incentive at their own pace?

  > leaving the necessary work... up to the math community

People still play chess and go and StarCraft. People do what people want to do. It's not clear whether this will reduce the number of working mathematicians or increase it. There will a lot to learn from the machine proofs that will open up new frontiers as well.

So, it's like the story, "We'll see."

There has been a shocking but not altogether surprising development, and all reactions are valid.

I think that this specific blog post is an important one for history.

The stunned responses indicate a set of some of humanity's brightest struggling to comprehend the emergence of such an incomprehensibly creative and powerful intelligence.

AI has come for coding.

AI has come for mathematics.

AI will come for everything else if we don't do something NOW.

It really pains me to read the responses here to this and the AHM statements. It feels like HN people here are talking with such... privilege. These are the smartest people on the planet saying "hey, please don't do this, it's seriously hampering our work in this field". And then people on here say that mathematicians are... gate keeping? Not embracing progress? Who are you to say that? How do you know? What happened to empathy for others? I don't understand you all...

I sympathise with a lot of the details of mathematicians' complaints, but at the same time I still see very few people stepping beyond "what will this do for the discipline" to think "what will this do for social welfare". It's like hearing scribes complaining about the printing press. Yes, I'm sorry that you won't get paid to do beautiful illuminated manuscripts, but I think the benefit to society outweighs that, and if it didn't, then why were you being paid to do the illumination in the first place?

It's not that there aren't possible arguments here (AI is destroying the basis for further progress). But this perspective is hardly even being addressed by most of the reactions.

Many of the reactions are some version of 'pissed off', which I totally understand. This reaction stands out and resonates with me:

> With these AI-generated papers, I feel that we, as a community, are not applying the same standards of quality and rigour. They can simply release multiple 100+ page papers claiming to have solved this or that problem, often with redundant arguments, unclear logical structure, multiple dead ends, and strange or unsettling terminology — in other words, slop. And we are then expected to go through it, check it, clean it up, simplify it, and explain what is actually going on. This comes at a considerable cost to us in terms of time and effort, while they can simply move on and slop-bulldoze the next conjecture. And, of course, the credit remains theirs. In some sense, we are willingly contributing to our own demise.

I'm not a mathematician, so I didn't even try to read it. But if it is unreadable slop -- then why should we (humans) believe it is correct? And why should professional mathematicians labor through reading it?

So why are these models more successful than mathematicians at solving these problems? Is it because of the computational power they bring to the problem? Is it because they use new techniques not thought of before? Or is it because human mathematicians have been approaching these problems in the wrong way?

The bittersweet irony of an explosion of scientific progress under anti-intellectual political leadership.

An interesting split in reactions by people who work in mathematics to the OpenAI release:

1. Reacting from the POV of the individual person: disappointment, disillusionment, and/or grief from those who've worked on some problem for years and now don't have something to work on; it's been a part of their identity. As well as those whose career tracks and plans were thrown in disarray.

I wholeheartedly sympathize with the above.

2. Reacting from the POV of the entirety of mathematics as a field of study/research:

  "If OpenAI wanted to destroy the mathematical community, this would be a great way to go about it."

  "...it will create conflict in the mathematical community;"

  "I feel that solving so many problems in such a short time may damage the math community and profession"

  "They can simply release multiple 100+ page papers claiming to have solved this or that problem, often with redundant arguments, ... — in other words, slop. And we are then expected to go through it, check it, clean it up, simplify it, and explain what is actually going on. This comes at a considerable cost to us ...And, of course, the credit remains theirs."

This second type of reaction... is confusing. No one is forced to read any of the papers. Ignore them if you want. But also, isn't reading papers a lot of the job?

  "Open problems are a resource that the mathematical community developed over decades or even centuries"

I doubt mathematicians have intentionally not solved problems just so that they can remain unsolved? Build on these advancements (or disprove them - wouldn't that be an amazing result!) and pose new problems?

What if a human dropped all of these without AI? I suspect there wouldn't be the same reaction for some reason.

I believe this whole AI vs. mathematicians story is only at the very beginning and that Mathematicians have an extremely narrow view of what's happening.

In particular, for Mathematicians worried about the inscrutability of AI-generated proofs and about the fact that Maths is first and foremost about understanding rather than proving for the sake of proving, they're vastly underestimating what AI will be able to deliver in years to come.

IMO, it's very likely that:

    - AI will not just be able to prove theorems but more importantly *increase* the speed at which we *intuitively* understand the phenomenon under scrutiny. All these AI companies are busy using AIs to prove stuff, none of them has yet tried to point an AI in the direction of making an existing proof more understandable and intuitive to a human. My bet is there will be AIs trying to find the shortest path (where shorter = easier to understand) from an existing body of knowledge to a theorem proof, thereby iteratively slowly but surely "compressing" the whole universe of Mathematical knowledge over time (and making it easier for humans to digest).

    - Same story for "discovering new mathematics", the other many-times-rehashed concern that AI-doing-math will impede that particular endeavor. Who's to say we can't define a bunch of criteria that quantify "interesting", point a bunch of AI's at it and press the button?

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.

All of these reactions from Mathematicians keep reminding me of - true or urban legend, doesn't matter - the ballad of John Henry [1] who, according to the lore, died trying to compete with a steam powered drill.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)

I think human mathematicians would be more enthusiastic if these frontier labs were putting out new interesting open problems. As some of them are pointing out in the responses, the purpose of having big open questions is often more about the tools and techniques used in solving them. If some can be gleaned from the AI proofs then great but, if not, the only real outcome for some (not all) of these results is that humans won't be able to develop those techniques.

If OpenAI were coming up with interesting problems that everyone could explore as they foreclosed all these existing ones, I don't think the response would be as critical. Obviously, that's much more difficult and doesn't tie into the only telos of these companies (having a huge IPO to make all their investors and equity holding employees rich).

As usual (at least, as of recently), Terry Tao's assessment is measured but trenchant. Mathematical research has been a human process of improving understanding, to an extent that if you go far back enough in time, it was not distinguished from "philosophy". Part of that involves (involved?) ac academic engagement with the pursuit of knowledge, which means that results are discussed, presented, picked apart, etc., in a community of other people in pursuit of knowledge. The end result being the sum knowledge that humanity possesses grows. The way these results were dumped unceremoniously bypasses all of that. And, because we have all seen what regard the tech leadership class have shown for humanity, even in much more concrete and significant ethical questions than "is it ok to destroy the academic community", such as "is it ok to lower the friction to surveilling and/or enacting violence on society to the extent that it's all encompassing", I think it's pretty reasonable that their complicity in the latter will extend to the former.

I should point out that this is not a categorical treatment of AI results. I think about outcomes. Would I be angry if OpenAI dropped full contents of all the Vesuvius Challenge scrolls? Obviously not.

I feel it would be effective and prudent to protest the current use of AI in mathematics and to effectively unionize and ostracize AI use until many of these demands are met. The companies that own the models and the infrastructure will never be more vulnerable. They have fired a salvo. Fire Back.

I read a bunch of carpenters bemoaning the invention of the table saw.