‘Pure insanity’: Mathematicians will need years to make sense of OpenAI’s latest drop
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Careers upended overnight, academics will have to separate solutions from slop while OpenAI moves on.
Key facts
- OpenAI said only 300 top-line results out of 719 manuscripts had been formalized, around 42 percent, and that it “will update the repository with more formalizations as they obtain them
- In Scotland, Colva Roney-Dougal, a professor of mathematics at St Andrews University, described a similarly bleak atmosphere among colleagues and students
- A proof to the three-dimensional version of Kakeya was among the achievements NYU mathematician Hong Wang was awarded a Fields Medal for earlier this year
- In the hours and days following the drop, most mathematicians The Verge spoke with said they were still struggling to digest everything; several said that simply working through the roughly 40-page
Summary
Those were among the descriptions more than three dozen mathematicians reached for in conversations with The Verge as they tried to make sense of the flood of mathematical results OpenAI abruptly dropped on the field this week. In all, OpenAI released nearly 400 AI-generated results. The sheer volume of work makes even a preliminary assessment as to exactly what the company has released difficult. Sprinkled among the hundreds of manuscripts are formalizations in Lean, a programming language and proof assistant that allows results to be verified computationally.