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Comment by leereeves | Hacker News Reader

> It requires that all sorts of results were made unknowingly by mathematicians but they somehow didn't realize it.

It only requires that several different mathematicians knowingly found partial results but weren't aware of the results made by other mathematicians.

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In that case, I'm glad AI could so handily improve collaboration for frontier mathematics. Progress should not be held back by a lack of willingness or ability to cooperate.

Is it really "collaboration" if someone takes results discovered by other people and uses them without acknowledgement?

It's more collaboration than what was happening before, if all you care about is the knowledge, not the accolades.

The accolades matter for more than pride; they lead to money that funds more work.

I think part of what's getting the goat of some mathematicians is not that OpenAI is getting results, but that OpenAI is telling mathematicians that priority isn't something they care about. The indifference is more threatening to the current traditions of math than if they were actually fighting for priority. The indifference gets reinterpreted as them trying to "steal glory" but that's not what they're doing. They're bulldozing glory.

Well I guess it's time the mathematics business model is updated.

Processing results takes time. Sometimes months or years. They can meet up at conferences to discuss, publish their partial results, and the mathematics community can come together to understand and piece the true answer together. None of this requires crotchety old men hoarding results, trust me, those people are smart enough not to put that in AI. They made a small result that is highly likely dependent on some input they made to the AI. The AI collates everyone's work and puts the cherry(s) on top to finalize it. Of course there is work done by the AI that only requires the sum of public human knowledge as well. But you seem very angry and accusatory at researchers, like they're some secretive cabal hoarding gold, furious at the new "give everyone our gold" machine. The people that do this science literally live for sharing and speaking and disseminating this knowledge.

Have you every used AI for work on truly cutting edge at least graduate level academic research? It's nothing like writing software, i do both professionally. Every model I've had access to requires a LOT of hand holding to get it to do the right thing. No model is getting set up with a single prompt, told to go, and then solving a millennium problem (unless they've explicitly stated that, which i would still doubt). It takes a lot of guidance to get these AIs to solve any serious problem. It's not outside at least my reach to believe that openAI is taking these nudges from intelligent people and combining those with the internal, non public models to make great press releases as it tumbled towards an infinite debt wall. I don't think there's a thing they wouldn't do to save their company.

I think you're wrong, looks like models are just finding and writing up publishable papers on novel results now just by giving them a single prompt and telling them to do so.

Preprint link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.33179

Author's post on LinkedIn with details: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/christopher-herzog-a2985229a_...

Prompt to GPT-5.6 Sol:

"I would like you to write for me a short article that could be published in Physical Review Letters. I would like you to choose the question, do the analysis and write up the results. The constraints I put on the question are 1) that it should be in the hep-th set of topics (so that I have a hope of evaluating the arguments and results); 2) the answer can be written up in a short format of 5 pages or less; 3) the result is of significance enough that it can be published in PRL. I want to break up the task into several steps. The first is to find a good question, so give me three candidates. I’m also going to involve Claude in the process. Claude is going to find three candidates too, and the next step will be to evaluate each others’ candidate questions."

You curiously leave out a significant sentence in his post, "After two weeks of further work, we were able to check everything and put the prose in a form that could be understood by mere mortals."

This is not a model one-shotting a published paper! It's not even published! Anyone with a name can get a preprint up. I read this to mean that he gave it a prompt to find problems, then _he evaluated and chose the problem_, undoubtedly to be someone simple and quick which could be presented in less than 5 pages. After that he let the program work on its own for "a couple of hours". After which he spent _2 weeks_ with the model to improve the results. This does not argue against my point, this is exactly what I'm saying. Of course a model can do parts of the process, but it's terrible at writing it up "in a way mere mortals can understand". You have to hand hold and guide and do work yourself. And this is by an established professor in the field with a record of publications.

I ask you again, have _you_ used this technology to perform graduate+ level research?

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