Comment by karahime
1 day ago
Extremely unfortunate that gate keeping got to the point where they felt the need to ask for permission to share math.
1 day ago
Extremely unfortunate that gate keeping got to the point where they felt the need to ask for permission to share math.
After how poorly OpenAI and Anthropic handled the previous cases, I approve of the more measured and cautious approach this time.
We cannot have them rushing to publish amidst tons of confusion, rumors of threats/scooping and outright plagiarism of existing work (by failing to cite said work).
If they're going to participate as scientists in these more rigorous fields, they're going to have to match that level of rigor, not lower it to the disastrous low that ML research publication is at.
It was OpenAI that fucked up the Navier Stokes explosion situation, not Anthropic
I'm not referring to just that. For example, Anthropic published a half done report about some biology research that turned out to have already been discovered and patented, and IIRC both companies are guilty of claiming results without doing the basic diligence of citing the material their work builds on, effectively passing it off as entirely done by their AIs.
In previous math sharing there was speculation about stealing human researcher's results or progress, via prompt inputs from those researchers, and sharing that as their own result. They're adjusting their process, and it seems ok.
Let’s be very clear, the alleged “stolen results” were largely the product of another LLM, not de novo human work. Also, it was false - they did not steal the results.
No clue why I'm downvoted for this, HN struggles with truth-seeking on these topics.
> HN struggles with truth-seeking on these topics.
The facts are much more nuanced than how you're presenting them here.
4 replies →
Can you show where it was discounted? Last I heard OpenAI was declining to deny it, presumably while they thoroughly confirmed.
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I really don't get how people are still continuing with this "stolen results" narrative after today. Like NS was kinda insignificant compared to treasure trove they released now, thinking that the LLM needs to "steal" from some human is simply coping.
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Just to be very clear: they aren't asking for permission, they are framing it that way because of the bad press.
There's no gatekeeping here!
> There's no gatekeeping here!
https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/07/on-openais-release-o...
Right? Math is the most open of our academic knowledge institutions, by virtue of what it is. It's easy to get any math publication, and I am not aware of any other fields where an anonymous person can publish their work informally in an anime discussion and enter the annals of math knowledge.
This is a tricky one, but I do sort of agree with you. However OpenAI doesn’t give most researchers access to the models which produced the work. So the gatekeeping goes both ways, I think.
They didn't even follow the recommendations of the reference group. A few of them maybe, but this is still a dump of llm-written papers.
The gate keeping, I'm afraid, will be now in the hands of various bubecks, responding directly to even more disgusting people.
With all the hierarchy present in mathematics, I would prefer it by far.
This thing named inappropriately "OpenAI" goal is just grabbing and monopolizing. Capitalists before could not really touch the deep of the human spirit with their filth, now they can.
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> harming human communities
Said communities are doing that all on their own by caring about what AI is doing rather than just focusing on their own thing as they did before AI. It's a serious kind of envy IMO.
I think this topic deserves some empathy.
It is not about AI the technology, plenty of mathematicians are happy to use AI, it is about the AI companies. The tech only exists because of centuries of mathematical tradition in open science. Moreover, the livelihoods of mathematicians depend on research results and ideas which can be developed only by doing the hard work of exploring open problems.
The recent statement from mathematicians is about how the labs have spent tens of millions of dollars (resources even entire math groups at universities can only dream of) on what was essentially marketing bragging rights for their models. This directly harms the math community by depriving them of opportunities for both funding and fertile ground for new ideas, while at the same time being built on top of their entire body of work.
Now, have OpenAI decided to change their practices and stop publishing math just because they are disrupting an entire field? Not really, since this release still dumps a huge number of results to open problems without waiting for human understanding to catch up. But at least they have committed to funding programs and talking to members of the field to work out how to best evolve it in this new world. And we will still get the benefits of results that happen to have applications.
> do not have immediate application
How do you know? Seems statistically unlikely with 720 problems, most of them well known
I don't! But there is no such qualifier in the announcement. Perhaps OpenAI ought to filter for the problems that have immediate applications, and leave some that are unclear for people.