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Comment by samuelknight | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI is publishing the math because they want mathematicians to read along and verify the work they are doing. The author complained that even the citations don't make a lot of sense. This is completely consistent with my experience of using AI for coding. When I task my agent a hard problem and it comes back with a 5000 line PR that I don't follow I reject it and work it into a better shape. I certainly don't slam it into production because it has a 'high signal' of the program I asked for. The mathematician's situation is a lot worse because they have no view over the process that created the artifact like we do with coding agents.

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> When I task my agent a hard problem and it comes back with a 5000 line PR that I don't follow I reject it and work it into a better shape. I certainly don't slam it into production because it has a 'high signal' of the program I asked for.

??? That's literally what everyone does. You are creating a hypothetical that is nonsensical. Here's your hypothetical:

1. Agent gives you 5000 lines of slop

2. You reject it and just do it yourself

This is reality

1. Agent gives you 5000 lines of slop

2. you realise that it has done a lot of research and is mostly in the correct direction and you ask it nicely to refine it

3. verify that you understood it and push it to prod

Are mathematicians babies that they need a completely different approach?

The mathematician in this case didn't ask an AI for the proof, they were handed a badly written artifact and other people are messaging him asking for analysis. He has no visibility into the process that produced the paper because it came from an internal OpenAI model. The bad behavior here isn't coming from the complaining mathematician. OpenAI hasn't sufficiently developed their workflow to create cutting edge research AND publish it intelligibly, which is odd because the latter should be easier. OpenAI has perverse incentive to do this because spamming badly written papers can still give them priority credit for solving open problems at the expense of mathematicians (who are currently indispensable because they decide whether claims are credible). What Mr. Karagila is trying to enforce are the old standards that review should come after refined explanation of the solution. If that was the case before AI, I can't see a reality in which that isn't the standard now that papers can be pumped out at faster-than-human time scales.

My point is that

1. the proofs are hard to read

2. but are still sufficiently high enough signal to understand the proof

3. blaming OpenAI for releasing high signal information on important problems is wrong. OpenAI did the right thing here.

4. the mathematicians can take however long they want to digest it and verify it. They have no legal obligation to do it immediately

This is exactly how I'd like society to work. Publish and let information get democratised quickly.

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