I agree, and I disagree. There are plenty of published mathematical papers that are just as poorly written as OpenAI's. Nobody says nothing because the authors are big names. In some cases, the proofs are not even correct, but everybody has a feeling the result are true nonetheless, so they pretend not to see it. So I agree that OpenAI should have done a better job of writing down the results, probably by paying working mathematicians like Anthropic did. But I disagree that this low-quality writing is somehow a good reason to be angry at OpenAI specifically, otherwise you would have to be angry at a lot of people.

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SilverSlash 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> There are plenty of published mathematical papers that are just as poorly written as OpenAI's. Nobody says nothing because the authors are big names.

Can you provide some evidence of this claim? "Nobody says nothing" probably works on reddit but I generally expect higher quality discourse on hackernews.

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geordiew an hour ago | parent [-]

I am a working mathematician. A problem that I cared about greatly (and probably spent > 3000 hours working on) was on their list. I looked at the paper, and I have to say it is more clearly written than about 30% of the papers I typically referee. I don't want to name poorly written papers, but I agree that "there are plenty of published papers that are just as poorly written as OpenAI's".

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SilverSlash an hour ago | parent [-]

And which papers do you typically referee? Without that information this claim is meaningless. For example, if you referee free-for-all papers that today are likely written by LLMs as well then sure I can understand that. But if you referee papers from grad students then that's more concerning.

	▲	geordiew 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I have only twice (knowingly) refereed AI slop. I'm mostly talking about refereeing in the period 2010 - 2020. (However, looking here https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/08/100-reactions-to-100... it seems that many other consider many of the papers poorly written. I just wanted to give one datapoint.)

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robotpepi 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

These takes forget that OpenAI is doing all this as a PR stunt. They're utilizing the field without worrying about any consequence to it.