It’s a funny one. I’m not sure what a Lean-less LLM proof even is. LLMs are amazing at bullshitting and skipping key steps and details. I’d imagine a LLM non Lean proof to be generally hard to evaluate - harder than that of a human mathematician perhaps. And the scale effect is against OAI here - the firehose just keeps squeezing out proofs.

I'm up for all the exciting results. But, can't they check once properly before publishing?

I don't think that's true. If what you're doing is building a fuzzer for mathematical proofs then just say that? The fact that it's doing some of the initial work on hard problems is cool. So is the fact that the promise of that new approach is having a social effect of crowd sourcing talented people to follow up on that work. No need to try to misrepresent it as more than that.

It’s not unreasonable to want OpenAI to be thorough and rigorously check their work before sharing it though. Sounds like that didn’t happen here.

They are not publishing Lean proofs. They are publishing proofs in natural language, and are not submitting to journals.

They are just putting out a bunch of weirdly written extremely long and technical papers and saying: Hey, here is the solution (we hope there are no mistakes).

The difference is that human mathematicians wouldn't post it online, claim they have achieved some proof, and then check after publication and announcing the results to the world. You would always check your work first, then publish it. It's not about preprint vs peer-reviewed. That of course is normal practice, it's the high-profile claims that are being made that are the problem here. They just blindly published results produced by the LLM, with 0 due diligence.

exactly, cf andrew wiles first proof of fermat's last theorem

See DDOS. That's exactly how humans access a web page. Why is it okay for humans to access a webpage, but when a bot swarm does it, it's irresponsible?

That's an analogy among many others, but the point is that OpenAI should use their tools responsibly. If they have 700 potential ground-breaking but unproven results, they should share it in a way that they do not get free (possibly unwarranted) publicity for it.

I don't think people in power that can affect my life with their decisions are ignoring this, or that they have a math background.

The "irresponsible" part is about how orange buffoons in power will read this, and immediately defund all universities, and mathematicians will lose their jobs, leaving us with nothing but an AI tool that no one can keep in check anymore.

> on advice of mathematicians

Whom? Did they create their own board of mathematicians that would agree with them? See below Terence Tao's blog, sharing a statement from the Association for Human Mathematics.

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/07/ahm-statement-on-o...

AI is an incredible tool, and yes I am disappointed that every leader in this field is acting unethically and irresponsibly because they want to "win" a race that would make them slightly richer than the loser.

It were published proofs of unknown quality (how did they verify it) and unknown peer-review process. Its lower standards than usually accepted for math proofs.