OpenAI posts 700 AI-generated math preprints, mathematicians balk

OpenAI posted more than 700 AI-generated mathematical preprints to GitHub simultaneously on October 6, generated by an unreleased model, Nature reports. The reaction from research mathematicians has been pointed.

"Why is OpenAI trying to solve hundreds of math problems to be released all at once?" asked Alvaro Lozano-Robledo, a number theorist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, on X. Michael Harris, a number theorist at Columbia University, put it more flatly: "I can't bring myself to spend my time studying [these preprints], so I will not be reading these papers."

Ursula Martin, a mathematician at the University of Oxford, said OpenAI was "tossing the community a messy first draft and expecting us to clean it up for them." One researcher labeled the moment a "scoopolypse," worried that human mathematicians would find in-progress projects pre-empted by the bulk release.

Not every reaction was hostile. Levent Alpöge, a mathematician at rival lab Anthropic in San Francisco, posted on X that whatever one thinks about the release, "it's obviously the most significant moment in mathematical history." The drop follows a September preprint in which OpenAI claimed to solve one of the original seven Millennium Prize problems, the Navier-Stokes equation.

An OpenAI spokesperson told Nature the point is building tools for scientists: "we evaluate and develop our models against difficult frontier problems in all sciences." Three of the AI researchers we follow in our Who's Who directory shared the Nature piece the day it went up.