This is a strawman. OpenAI didn't say they are expecting all mathematicians to read the solutions, incomprehensible or not.
So mathematicians are upset with OpenAI for solving "their" math problems. Software engineers are even more affected by AI, yet mathematicians seem to be reacting more strongly. I don't get why.
It looks like the spent $20 on writing the actual papers.
If they actually wanted to do good for the world, they wouldn't have released these as the slop grenades they are.
In their current state, they are actively damaging the mathematics community.
It shows a lack of respect and care for the impact that their technology has.
It shows that they cannot be trusted for things like private data, AI safety, and company partnerships.
In math/science, repeatability and review are critical to the process.
The right way to handle this would have been to work with the mathematics community to co-develop and create meaningful proofs rather than slop grenades.
If they proceed in the current state, we'll just get a bunch of spaghetti math that won't do anything for helping people build an understanding.
Maybe some day, we won't need people to understand things, but that's certainly not the case at the moment, and likely won't be for several more years.
Perhaps this is projection, and the staff at OpenAI doesn't understand their work anymore? Not a great sign regardless.
The mathematics community can finish the job OpenAI started. Or are you saying the community has no incentive to do that because there is no reward/recognition for doing that?
They didn't just "start" it though - they released slop papers.
That's finishing it - not starting it as far as scientific publishing is concerned.
> Or are you saying the community has no incentive to do that because there is no reward/recognition for doing that?
Not exactly - but that is part of it.
I think what would have went over better is:
1. Immediately announce a solution has been found.
2. Do not publish the solution.
3. Put out an open request for anyone with experience in the area who wants to get involved to help collaborate on a construction and human-comprehensible paper. Accept anyone who can demonstrate potentially useful work/experience in the field/problem. Share the solution with them after they sign some kind of NDA that they won't independently publish or share the solution/work.
4. Work with people until a paper is ready (I mean actually ready - not the kind of slop that they released).
5. Publish. Include names of everyone who made meaningful contributions to the paper (not just the proof).
EDIT: Notice the incentive with my proposed second path is that it gives OpenAI an incentive to improve the interpretability of its proofs. This is a good thing! The maths community would be thrilled to actually gain understanding from such releases, and OpenAI would be happy because they could more quickly and independently publish their results. At the moment the "value" of their mathematics research "product" is low because of the lack of this interpretability, and this current approach is simultaneously destroying the opportunity value of the community as well as the incentive for OpenAI to ever improve on what's missing.
OpenAI is doing science the right way. Making the information available as widely as possible so that anyone can check and verify it.
That is the scientific process working exactly as it should.
If that "damages the mathematics community" then all it means is the mathematics community is not doing science and should be ignored.
I cannot stress this enough. If you are complaining about "how they released it" or calling this stuff "slop cannons", you're an unscientific hack that's dragging down humanity.
Engage with the actual claims. Prove them or disprove them. Nothing else matters here.
To me, science is not a database of facts and data, and the scientific process is not just the process of adding to this database.
It is more than that.
Science is building the database of facts and data, but it is also sharing/disseminating that database so that others can write to it too.
We both agree that "openness" is critical for this, but to me, the scientific process includes things like the actual words that a scientist uses to communicate their ideas/data, the paper they wrote, the collaborations they had, the work that they built upon. Science is not like a database only - its more like a distributed system, and the scientific community is like a living, breathing thing. It is the health of that system which has been damaged in my opinion.
So I have no problem that OpenAI updated the database.
They didn't just make the information available though.
They updated the knowledge database, then released low quality slop papers.
They made it clear that they don't give a damn about sharing/disseminating information.
They are trying to fundamentally say "we can do science without prioritizing sharing.
We don't think its important. We'll release the proof because it makes our stock go up, but we're gonna keep going and building and not spend any time on communication or comprehension because we think that it doesn't matter, and your contributions don't matter, and AI is gonna do all of this independently anyway. We spent $20m on the proof because it made our stock go up $20b, but we'll spend 20 min on the paper. Priorities clear.
Does any of that make sense?
The thing is, that is a "nice to have", not a condition to make science.
If people believe that such things are useful, then the appropriate response is to reproduce, simplify and otherwise make the proofs provided into more easily digestible pieces.
The scientific process is fundamentally indifferent to whatever shibollets and cultural hangups that its presumed participants may have. An alien with fundamentally different norms from us, who experiments to determine the boiling temperature of water is doing science just as much as a human, even if he never submits a paper to a journal.
The issue you're having is that you're under the mistaken belief that the scientific process is the "community" and "norms" that happen to have developed over the past few centuries by this "scientific" priesthood.
It is not. It has never been. It will never be.
This "scientific" priesthood has simply used their power and reputation to enforce their own self-aggrandizing norms, much like the religious priesthood they replaced. They should not be taken seriously, and to go along with these norms when they are unnecessary is frankly ridiculous and shameful for anyone who actually prizes results.
I would urge you to reconsider your stance, and in particular to put deep thought into why you believe these norms are so important.
https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/08/100-reactions-to-100...
And then tell me that this has not damaged the mathematics community.
I would urge you to reconsider your stance, and in particular to put deep thought into why you believe OpenAI is not going about this wrong.
Fundamentally the main points being made seem to boil down to this excerpt from Tristan Humbert:
>Open AI claimed a proof of the conjecture in full generality this morning and my first impression was sadness to see my favorite problem get “killed” by AI ; it is definitely easier to ignore a problem when it does not affect you directly. Next, I felt stressed because I am currently applying for postdocs and more of my research plan was now obsolete and I spent the whole morning rewriting everything and sending emails to my advisors in panic. Finally, I felt anger after opening the paper and observing that it was mostly unreadable slop.
They're essentially angry at "They did before i could", and "Now i don't have a job" and "I dislike how it is written".
It just reinforces the "scientific priesthood" theme.
These are people who had their livelihoods and status derived from this thing which is now fundamentally obsolete, and they are scared and upset that they will no longer have those things.
That's fine, its a normal human reaction. God knows i'm not sure i will have a job in 5 years because of AI!
But we should not be taking it with any more seriousness than we would take a ludite gripping about the mechanization of cloth manufacturing.
The truth is, the value produced by their job just fell off a cliff. They need to find something else that provides value to replace it. That's it. Being upset about it isn't going to be productive.
Perhaps the value they can make is to rewrite the AI proofs to a more understandable format. Perhaps it is to go flip burgers at McDonalds. That's up to them, but i would suspect that calling releasing valuable information as "bad for science" is not very value accretive.