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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

I don't really like these articles, because they seem extremely hard to verify. OpenAI has published a lot of stuff in the past where, upon close inspection, what they're saying is technically true but a lot less interesting or impressive than the headline. Except by the time anyone looks into it, the hype has moved on. It seems like there's maybe a thousand people in the world that can even say if this is good or not?

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1. A lot more than 1000, you're off by more than one order of magnitude. It's definitely beyond my level of graph theory knowledge (undergrad level) but looking at the paper, it's not using any crazy machinery, and it's less than 3 pages.

2. Those people will say whether it's a good proof or not. We have other examples of interesting proofs from AI, we're really beyond the point of arguing whether it can produce any interesting math (though it seems to do much better at combinatorics than anything else).

Right, but my criticism is to the hit-and-run nature of these hype pieces. By the time there's any semblance of what it actually means everyone has moved on but then you have a bunch of people operating under delusions from the hype. I get why OpenAI does it but I wish people would stop upvoting it. Like, hacker news is not a mathematics forum so the only purpose of this kind of thing is hype boosting or polarizing people. I am not looking forward to the "MATH IS SOLVED!" people for the next few days.

You are basically right. The real acceptance of the proof comes when it's accepted to a journal after review.

However, in some sense spreading a proof needs to be done in math - then the community reviews and decides if it is valid.

We can't ignore the timing here though: this is a publicity piece for GPT 5.6!

I think you may be overindexing on the criticisms here. OpenAI has absolutely done impressive work in math already, and the criticisms are almost always based on the article that they initially published, usually available here in the HN comments within a few hours at most. Headlines will be headlines and hype guys will be hype guys, but OpenAI and Anthropic aren't lying and their bots are doing impressive work.

This one is a well-known problem with a brief, approachable proof, and they published the prompt.

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