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Because there exist people who are in deep love with mathematics, but weren't able to get a research position (or cannot afford to take a temporary position at some university for which they would even have to relocate).
So, your question is more like: why would someone play a video game without getting paid?
For this work, you're either inserting coins into Codex, effectively donating money, or you're shoveling your way through the slop that the purchasers of that repo couldn't be bothered to clean up themselves.
Rather: as a necessary evil you give money to OpenAI/Anthropic because you really want to see (ideally fast) progress on this mathematical/algorithmic problem.
It's fundamentally incongruous with someone that "loves the game". And I hope that you have a good excuse for ruining it, hopefully a seven or eight figure excuse.
Rather, it's like saying "I love eating good food."
One approach is to learn to cook excellently, buy high-quality ingredients etc. Then invest time to cook a delicious meal. This is like learning math, becoming exceptional in one area, and then work on the problem.
Another approach is to go to a well-rated restaurant, order some food there, and pay a decent amount of money for the food. This is like buying AI tokens, and setting up some agents to work on math problems.
Both approaches are suitable. And I guess/hope many people who really would love to contribute to progress in mathematics would really prefer to go the first way. But because
- they are not highly gifted
- have a time-consuming daily job and/or family
- simply cannot afford the high opportunity cost to get to a suitable level in math
- ...
the only way such people can contribute to progress in math is the second approach. That's why these people behave like they do.
I am quite confident that most of such contributors don't like that their money lands in the hands of OpenAI/Anthropic.
So: Which approach would you recommend these people who are really eager to contribute to progress on some mathematical problems?
It's like saying "look, they may not be good at painting, so what can we do other than letting them take a can of spray paint to the contents of the Louvre?"
If you can't contribute, enjoy it passively, instead of doing damage.
Coming back to the particular project at the top of this thread (not TFA but the top comment), I don't see a problem with contributing to Lean verifications. One of the problems with the OpenAI dump is that half of it might be wrong, and formalizations resolve that. This is particularly relevant for this result, which is one of the few claims that didn't go in the direction one would expect before the drop.
You can for sure criticize OpenAI for not having done it themselves (I hereby do!). I guess you could make a case that engaging with their results somehow legitimizes their actions, but a) I don't expect OpenAI to care about this enough for it to matter, and b) you aren't making this case but a stronger one that any engagement somehow ruins mathematics and must be done for money. I don't think so! [1]
I personally am a complete amateur, but find this result one of the few overwhelmingly positive aspects of the drop. It's something people weren't expecting, so it probably saves time that would have been spent on trying to prove the O(n log n) lower bound; it's about a question that is extremely natural ("how fast can you multiply really big numbers", that's like the eight-year-old's vision of what math is!) and shows that there is absurdly complicated structure even behind the simplest things, which is why math is not getting "solved"; it didn't kill the question but started a whole program of trying to optimize the algorithm (currently AI-assisted, but I hope that if all AI magically disappeared tomorrow, in a few years people would be able to get there unassisted), plus TFA lists several other problems this algorithm could help with at the end of section 4.
That's the game I love, at least.
[1]: This was best put by Nestor Guillen (https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/13/happy-those-able-t...): AI with all its drama (of economic and political origin) is separate from LLMs the technology, which only work because they build on a corpus of intelligent text, including a lot of math. Had it been made by a responsible organization, and had it appeared more gradually, it could be treated as an amazing tool for literature search and testing how far a brute-force approach can go, which would only help test the value of new ideas. There is some shard of this in our actual situation as well, beneath all the politics.
Why bother contributing when there's no one on the other side. There's value being produced, but the beneficiary is mainly the corporations who run the models. Even if the result eventually benefits society in general, the credit goes to them. Not that "credit" or "clout" means much practically, but there used to be emotional and social value for the people involved.
You’re blinded by your hate for corporations, if you cannot see value here. The actual human who’s working on it responds, and you can’t help but make it about the AI that you believe is somehow only benefiting the corporation.
Has anyone actually gone through and fully understood the contents? My bet would be that nobody has looked, let alone understood, anything in there.
So, is collaboration just paying for more tokens, or is it doing the human understanding that the authors couldn't be arsed to do?
Either way, I hope nobody is foolish enough to fall for it.
It happened before. For example in Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem it took like half a year until someone found an error, another year until Wiles and Taylor fixed the proof and another half year until it was reviewed and published. Add a few years until it was widely understood (where widely is a small set of people that excludes me for now). Now there are even shorter proof.
The new thing here is that we are seen the internal discussion published online. Also, the chatbots like to make long pdf, so expect to see a pile of intermediate pdf created by chatbots+humans until we get a nice proof that is widely understood (this is more related to my area, I have a hope that I may understand it).
This is called faith, and as strange as it may sound, in a few decades this kind of faith in the machine will be commonplace, because it will prove its utility over and over and over again, and save mountains of human effort in the process. In 3-7 years we’ll start to see major practical applications from AI-led advances.
As a second-order effect we may even see the rise of an actual religion around AI. I’m not saying these are all positive effects, but it’s what I see happening - and like all technological revolutions there will be a huge number of positive effects alongside some deeply disturbing developments.
Yes, that I agree is definitely happening already. Like Arthur Clarke's famous saying about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic.
And it's true that these changes are not all positive or negative, that there is actual social value being produced by machine-generated mathematics, software, writing, visual works, etc. And that it's changing human culture in ways difficult to imagine while we're in the midst of the transformation.
I'll add another prediction: AI will become more and more "human" until it becomes indistinguishable practically. Eventually we will merge with it to become something more than human. It will be normal to have robot friends and sexual partners, and one day machine-human hybrid children.
By that point, corporations and governments will have merged to create a "benevolent" totalitarian system with complete surveillance and control, with an elite class overseeing the rest of humanity as domesticated population, like an automated farm. Oh wait we're already there, haha.
Assuming it becomes capable end, why would it want to merge with meat? That's like predicting that humans will merge with goldfish.
It's simply predicting that the neo-neo-cortex will remain merged with the thing that it grew out of.
Intelligence is just a tool.
Either what you say is true, in which case I see no reason to care about truth, science, or math (the machines will figure it out for me), or it isn't, and people are falling for dealing with slop on behalf of people too lazy to look at the turds they purchased.
Either way, I don't see any reason to participate in AI projects without getting paid.
Sci-fi has tainted our collective imagination of a tech-forward future - it doesn’t have to be that way.
Two things can be true - yes, AI can benefit mega-corporations AND drive spectacular human progress at the same time. Is all of it “good” by my ethical standards? No. Is it still valuable? Yes, immensely.
Please, just stop causing damage.
If you're going to insist on building your nihilistic, brainless, anti-human world, where the best outcome is that the AI remembers to refill the pet food bowl and clean the litter box, first find a way to let people opt out of your brand of hell.
We could just legalize heroin.
At the end of the day there is no reason, there is no purpose but the one you make for yourself. The universe doesn't care and will slowly wind itself down to thermal noise.
If they want to make a lean solution and publish it then they can because that's what they want to do.
And if you're breaking this much already, the future is going to be really really hard on you. You are not ready for what is coming.
The people using AI should be paid well enough that they can justify selling out their peers.
There are likely remote planets with alien intelligence on them -- aren't you glad we've explored distant stars and planets?
Also, I fucking hope society values cancer research enough to pay the researchers. If we don't, maybe we deserve what we prioritize.