Mathematicians argue over OpenAI's 722 papers: Tao speaks of the end of "Math 1.0", others fear plagiarism
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
The argument in science has moved from "can SI prove theorems" to "whose achievement is it": the bar of what is possible has been raised.
After OpenAI posted 722 papers produced by an internal model on GitHub (about three hours of compute per result on average), mathematicians split. According to Fortune, Dan Litt (Toronto) calls the release good for mathematics; Terence Tao (UCLA) sees in it the end of "Math 1.0": problems are being solved autonomously by people who have no interest in the broader field, which puts young people off; Tristan Buckmaster (NYU) asks whether the authors checked that human mathematicians' work was not incorporated into the results. OpenAI shared computer-verifiable proofs for many of the solutions. According to Quanta, on October 6 OpenAI announced a proof of the full unique games conjecture (in Lean format, with no human editing); on September 14, after hearing rumors of an SI breakthrough, Dor Minzer's team at MIT hurriedly posted a 95-page paper on a close variant of the conjecture after seven years of work. Semafor writes that experts are asking whether the model showed creative thinking or merely finished the last steps of other people's ideas.