Comment by ModernMech

Retraction and withdrawal are different. Retraction is when you publish something, it passes peer review, is published, and some time later its publication is undone, often by an editor or some other person because some fraud was uncovered.

Withdrawal is akin to submitting a paper to peer review and then when you’ve noticed mistakes, you decide to take the paper back and correct it.

Reject is when someone else notices the mistakes and tells you to take it back and correct it.

Withdrawal and reject happen all the time in a scientist’s career. They don’t necessarily mean the scientist is doing bad research, just the research was not ready. Retract usually means something more.

By dumping the papers, OpenAI skipped the typical peer review process, so peer review should be understood as what’s going on now as mathematicians look over the papers and find flaws.