OpenAI’s feud with mathematicians is only escalating — SkimNews
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- Twenty-five Fields Medalists signed an open letter arguing that AI labs are threatening mathematicians' intellectual work as they race to one-up each other with solutions to famous math problems.
- NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster accused OpenAI this week of pressuring him not to credit a collaborator who works for Anthropic for solving an important math problem, and wondered if the company used his Codex work to produce its own proof over a marathon weekend of inference.
- OpenAI withdrew its sponsorship of a math event at CalTech on Thursday after being criticized by researchers at the university.
- The signatories warned that AI proofs are often "announced in a rush" without proper writeups or citation of prior work, noting that OpenAI's proof remains unverified.
- Mathematicians are growing fearful that the culture of open research is under threat, as frontier labs can now spend tens of millions of dollars using LLMs to beat original researchers to proofs, incentivizing secrecy.
- The letter follows the Leiden Declaration, released by a working group of mathematicians in June, which offered recommendations for mathematicians, institutions, and policymakers grappling with LLM proofs.
- The signatories cautioned that other scientific and creative professions—and potentially all of humanity—will face similar issues as AI changes how work is done.
Why it matters: If AI labs can outspend mathematicians to beat them to their own proofs, the centuries-old culture of open attribution in mathematics erodes—and the signatories explicitly warn that every other knowledge profession faces the same dynamic. For OpenAI, the backlash from 25 of the most credentialed mathematicians alive, combined with the CalTech sponsorship withdrawal, is a reputational hit that could harden institutional resistance to AI-generated research claims.
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