> OpenAI drops some hundreds of "solutions", incomprehensibly written "solutions", and we are all expected to jump on them and what? Appreciate their contributions?

This is a strawman. OpenAI didn't say they are expecting all mathematicians to read the solutions, incomprehensible or not.

So mathematicians are upset with OpenAI for solving "their" math problems. Software engineers are even more affected by AI, yet mathematicians seem to be reacting more strongly. I don't get why.

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adverbly 7 hours ago | parent [-]

OpenAI spent $20m on this at least.

It looks like the spent $20 on writing the actual papers.

If they actually wanted to do good for the world, they wouldn't have released these as the slop grenades they are.

In their current state, they are actively damaging the mathematics community.

It shows a lack of respect and care for the impact that their technology has.

It shows that they cannot be trusted for things like private data, AI safety, and company partnerships.

In math/science, repeatability and review are critical to the process.

The right way to handle this would have been to work with the mathematics community to co-develop and create meaningful proofs rather than slop grenades.

If they proceed in the current state, we'll just get a bunch of spaghetti math that won't do anything for helping people build an understanding.

Maybe some day, we won't need people to understand things, but that's certainly not the case at the moment, and likely won't be for several more years.

Perhaps this is projection, and the staff at OpenAI doesn't understand their work anymore? Not a great sign regardless.

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flowerlad 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> The right way to handle this would have been to work with the mathematics community to co-develop and create meaningful proofs rather than slop grenades.

The mathematics community can finish the job OpenAI started. Or are you saying the community has no incentive to do that because there is no reward/recognition for doing that?

	▲	adverbly 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> the job OpenAI started. They didn't just "start" it though - they released slop papers. That's finishing it - not starting it as far as scientific publishing is concerned. > Or are you saying the community has no incentive to do that because there is no reward/recognition for doing that? Not exactly - but that is part of it. I think what would have went over better is: 1. Immediately announce a solution has been found. 2. Do not publish the solution. 3. Put out an open request for anyone with experience in the area who wants to get involved to help collaborate on a construction and human-comprehensible paper. Accept anyone who can demonstrate potentially useful work/experience in the field/problem. Share the solution with them after they sign some kind of NDA that they won't independently publish or share the solution/work. 4. Work with people until a paper is ready (I mean actually ready - not the kind of slop that they released). 5. Publish. Include names of everyone who made meaningful contributions to the paper (not just the proof). EDIT: Notice the incentive with my proposed second path is that it gives OpenAI an incentive to improve the interpretability of its proofs. This is a good thing! The maths community would be thrilled to actually gain understanding from such releases, and OpenAI would be happy because they could more quickly and independently publish their results. At the moment the "value" of their mathematics research "product" is low because of the lack of this interpretability, and this current approach is simultaneously destroying the opportunity value of the community as well as the incentive for OpenAI to ever improve on what's missing.