When Thom, the mathematician who now alleges plagiarism, posted his digestion [1] of OpenAI's construction of a non-sofic group, he does not mention the proof being familiar. He even calls the crucial argument clever, without noting he thought of it first. [1]https://mathoverflow.net/a/513885

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gnfargbl 10 hours ago | parent [-]

That link is a helpful contribution to this discussion.

I'm not at all familiar with this area, but my reading is that he appears to call it out as a relatively obvious extension of his own work:

> It is a creative and at the same time elementary construction that uses not just property (T) for an application of my result with Kun, but also for the ambient group G in order to overcome the problem, that the Γ-components might be of different size. Once this is achieved, the rest of the argument is straightforward.

Creative and at the same time elementary is where LLMs excel, generally speaking. It's why they are so good at writing code.

	▲	brumbelow an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> On the other side, I was looking myself for such a mechanism ever since we wrote the paper in 2019 and admire the efficiency of this construction. He seems to admit very clearly he does not see this as his own work. 'I was looking...' well why did he stop? Because the AI figured it out first. It seems quite odd to me to 'admire the construction' of something, only for your opinion to sour once that something figures it out first. I think a lot of the emotional reaction here is familiar to us non mathematicians: you spent years developing expertise, and then LLMs began producing competent work in areas that had previously required that expertise. That's understandably uncomfortable, but discomfort by itself isn't evidence of misappropriation.