OpenAI keeps bulldozing mathematicians — SkimNews
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- OpenAI announced the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (AGMAI) on September 21st via a guest post on Fields Medalist Terence Tao's blog, with nine elite mathematicians set to advise frontier AI labs on review and communication of results.
- OpenAI stressed AGMAI's independence in its own announcement, but several mathematicians told The Verge they initially assumed it was an OpenAI-appointed body, and member Martin Hairer conceded the company's phrasing "didn't really help."
- Martin Hairer, a mathematics professor at Imperial College London and EPFL and one of AGMAI's nine members, said the group receives no financial or technical support from OpenAI and is already in talks with other frontier AI labs, though he declined to name them.
- OpenAI says its unreleased internal model has "resolved more than 100 long-standing open problems across most areas of mathematics" since its Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize work, creating what Hairer described as "two days ago" of group planning for a looming tidal wave of releases.
- University of Connecticut professor Álvaro Lozano-Robledo told The Verge that boasting about solved problems without proper handling "is not how any academic behaves," calling the flood of AI-generated solutions a "burden" on mathematicians who must then assess them.
- OpenAI quietly altered documents after releasing "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science" in early August without announcing the changes or leaving a clear record, a pattern Hairer called "shoddy" and "really bad and sloppy scholarship."
Why it matters: OpenAI controls the release valve on more than 100 claimed mathematical breakthroughs, but mathematicians say its pattern of rushed, poorly edited announcements and silent post-publication edits makes it a reckless steward of a field built on credit and understanding — and a two-day-old advisory board with no master plan is now tasked with cleaning that up.
Ask SkimNews
