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Comment by karahime | Hacker News Reader

Extremely unfortunate that gate keeping got to the point where they felt the need to ask for permission to share math.

In previous math sharing there was speculation about stealing human researcher's results or progress, via prompt inputs from those researchers, and sharing that as their own result. They're adjusting their process, and it seems ok.

Let’s be very clear, the alleged “stolen results” were largely the product of another LLM, not de novo human work. Also, it was false - they did not steal the results.

No clue why I'm downvoted for this, HN struggles with truth-seeking on these topics.

Can you show where it was discounted? Last I heard OpenAI was declining to deny it, presumably while they thoroughly confirmed.

> “Following an investigation, we have confirmed that Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the two months preceding this announcement and paper on September 8, 2026, could not have influenced the system in any way, including through training.”

https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

Come on, they were working on this for more than 2 months. Dont fall for the corporate half truths.

Buckmaster himself said essentially all the progress they made was from July 15th onwards (with a new model on the problem) with no real progress prior to then.

I think it’s really cope to claim this was a human result being stolen.

I wasn’t asking because I trust them; I was asking because their denying it materially changes the situation.

If anything, the fact that they didn’t immediately deny it leads me to believe that they at least took the concern seriously.

Thanks!

I really don't get how people are still continuing with this "stolen results" narrative after today. Like NS was kinda insignificant compared to treasure trove they released now, thinking that the LLM needs to "steal" from some human is simply coping.

After reading your comment one could even think that LLM's invented math from the ground up.

HackerNews does love a good conspiracy theory.

> HN struggles with truth-seeking on these topics.

The facts are much more nuanced than how you're presenting them here.

What’s the nuance? Two researchers alleged theft. OpenAI investigated and confirmed that their research was not in the model’s training data. The world decided to take the first part as objective truth and ignored the second.

> OpenAI investigated and confirmed that their research was not in the model’s training data.

You mean when they say it was impossible to confirm anything but one day after it was 100% confirmed that there was no theft? And here I'm not even talking about all the ethical problems related to trying to scoop another group when you hear they're close to success, or how current solutions follow extremely closely human-generated ideas, or about the lack of relevant citations in OpenAI's paper.

Believing that OpenAI's claims have any substance cannot be explained by naivety alone.

They didn't try to scoop another group; they thought the other group had already solved it, so maybe their latest model could take a shot too... and the model solved the full problem when the other group had not! They found out after the fact that the other group had only solved an important sub-problem.

This was a low-key hilarious replay of George Dantzig and his homework problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig

The controversy was whether they had plagiarised that other work on the sub-problem, which they categorically denied after an investigation. And yes, a few days to investigate something like this is reasonable for a company as big as OpenAI. Having seen how data infra is set up when petabytes of data are flowing about, there are thousands of entwined data pipelines to figure out. Not quite as easy as running a query on a sqlite DB!

> Believing that OpenAI's claims have any substance cannot be explained by naivety alone.

Yes, they could be explained by a GitHub repo full of proofs :-)

Or are you suggesting there were hundreds of researchers who just happened to be close to solving hundreds of these long standing open problems using Codex, and OpenAI swooped in plagiarized them all? ;-)

glad you could present those facts in your comment, i know the HN character limit can make it hard

After how poorly OpenAI and Anthropic handled the previous cases, I approve of the more measured and cautious approach this time.

We cannot have them rushing to publish amidst tons of confusion, rumors of threats/scooping and outright plagiarism of existing work (by failing to cite said work).

If they're going to participate as scientists in these more rigorous fields, they're going to have to match that level of rigor, not lower it to the disastrous low that ML research publication is at.

It was OpenAI that fucked up the Navier Stokes explosion situation, not Anthropic

I'm not referring to just that. For example, Anthropic published a half done report about some biology research that turned out to have already been discovered and patented, and IIRC both companies are guilty of claiming results without doing the basic diligence of citing the material their work builds on, effectively passing it off as entirely done by their AIs.

Just to be very clear: they aren't asking for permission, they are framing it that way because of the bad press.

There's no gatekeeping here!

Right? Math is the most open of our academic knowledge institutions, by virtue of what it is. It's easy to get any math publication, and I am not aware of any other fields where an anonymous person can publish their work informally in an anime discussion and enter the annals of math knowledge.

> There's no gatekeeping here!

https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/07/on-openais-release-o...

They didn't even follow the recommendations of the reference group. A few of them maybe, but this is still a dump of llm-written papers.

This is a tricky one, but I do sort of agree with you. However OpenAI doesn’t give most researchers access to the models which produced the work. So the gatekeeping goes both ways, I think.

The gate keeping, I'm afraid, will be now in the hands of various bubecks, responding directly to even more disgusting people.

With all the hierarchy present in mathematics, I would prefer it by far.

This thing named inappropriately "OpenAI" goal is just grabbing and monopolizing. Capitalists before could not really touch the deep of the human spirit with their filth, now they can.

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