It’s fine that OpenAI posted their findings. It’s not fair to claim these problems have been solved. Not until someone can understand and verify the proof and then communicate the core, novel methodological element to someone else.
But this is Tao's point: Before, the mechanism by which a proof was verified and communicated and digested by the community was for the person who came up with the grotty, ugly first draft to engage with the community. Now there's nobody to really engage with, so the pipeline from "grotty, ugly draft" to "integrated into humanity's mathematical knowledge" has been broken.
So yeah, probably we should stop saying "X has been solved", and instead say, "A Lean proof for X (or !X) has been generated". That doesn't change the fact that incentives are currently on finding the proof, and once the proof is generated by an AI, there's not currently a good mechanism / incentive structure to move that into the mathematical community. AI is here, so we need to find a new mechanism.
It is not obvious to me that a single canonical human language write-up of a proof is the best output in this new world where write-ups are cheap. A human reader can query an LLM and get explanations of key points tailored to the reader's own background in mathematics.
There is no guarantee that the lean proof is 1:1 with the natural language equivalent. The lean proof can be lesser. This happened in the Navier-Stokes proof, e.g. see [1] in example 3.1. Having the certificate doesn't necessarily imply correctness.
On some consideration, surely. On the other hand, but at some point this is borderline like saying "universe already solved every physical problems, including possibility to represent deep important point of its own structure in compressed intelligent ways" and then tell that reaching it in an actual grabbable artifact is left as an exercise.
Possibly yes such a representation is possible. But it doesn’t mean it’s certain there is a "best compressed representation". And even less one that encompass everything important and that is understandable by any human brain, even the most exceptionally brilliant ones sponsored by a whole society to reach their best possible achievable performance on that goal through full dedication on that sole task.
Your phrasing is illuminating that perhaps they aren't engaged in the creation, understanding, or integration of these proofs by humanity; they just have them. For them, this is a slidedeck they can pass to investors, creditors, the marketing department. Something they can add to the employee onboarding pamphlet.
What should they do? Hyperbolic maybe, but perhaps engage with humanity.
No need. In the end the mathematicians that don't like this can just not look at the proofs or use them. They have that choice. Just like they didn't "ask" for them, they don't have to even acknowledge they exist.
> should they just have sat on them?
It’s fine that OpenAI posted their findings. It’s not fair to claim these problems have been solved. Not until someone can understand and verify the proof and then communicate the core, novel methodological element to someone else.
But this is Tao's point: Before, the mechanism by which a proof was verified and communicated and digested by the community was for the person who came up with the grotty, ugly first draft to engage with the community. Now there's nobody to really engage with, so the pipeline from "grotty, ugly draft" to "integrated into humanity's mathematical knowledge" has been broken.
So yeah, probably we should stop saying "X has been solved", and instead say, "A Lean proof for X (or !X) has been generated". That doesn't change the fact that incentives are currently on finding the proof, and once the proof is generated by an AI, there's not currently a good mechanism / incentive structure to move that into the mathematical community. AI is here, so we need to find a new mechanism.
It is not obvious to me that a single canonical human language write-up of a proof is the best output in this new world where write-ups are cheap. A human reader can query an LLM and get explanations of key points tailored to the reader's own background in mathematics.
Solving a problem is not solving anymore. Up is down, pleasure is pain, darkness is light, slavery is freedom, madness is sanity.
Many of these are lean formalized. Arguably a much higher bar than whatever peer review provides in terms of verification.
There is no guarantee that the lean proof is 1:1 with the natural language equivalent. The lean proof can be lesser. This happened in the Navier-Stokes proof, e.g. see [1] in example 3.1. Having the certificate doesn't necessarily imply correctness.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08144
On some consideration, surely. On the other hand, but at some point this is borderline like saying "universe already solved every physical problems, including possibility to represent deep important point of its own structure in compressed intelligent ways" and then tell that reaching it in an actual grabbable artifact is left as an exercise.
Possibly yes such a representation is possible. But it doesn’t mean it’s certain there is a "best compressed representation". And even less one that encompass everything important and that is understandable by any human brain, even the most exceptionally brilliant ones sponsored by a whole society to reach their best possible achievable performance on that goal through full dedication on that sole task.
>They got all these proofs...
Your phrasing is illuminating that perhaps they aren't engaged in the creation, understanding, or integration of these proofs by humanity; they just have them. For them, this is a slidedeck they can pass to investors, creditors, the marketing department. Something they can add to the employee onboarding pamphlet.
What should they do? Hyperbolic maybe, but perhaps engage with humanity.
...they did.
No need. In the end the mathematicians that don't like this can just not look at the proofs or use them. They have that choice. Just like they didn't "ask" for them, they don't have to even acknowledge they exist.
BlackBox: The proof is in the pudding
This isn't only bad for Math — it's bad for English too.
'Proof' is going to become the 2026 Most Misapplied Word of the Year.
At least check them properly. They have already withdrawn some of them.