It’s safe to say that when it comes to mathematicians, OpenAI isn’t exactly winning hearts and minds.
On Tuesday, the ChatGPT maker released hundreds of new papers with purported proofs for all sorts of mathematical problems — fresh off of explosive controversy over how its AI agents arrived at a solution to the Navier-Stokes equations.
The handling of the release, as with the Navier-Stokes, has grated experts in the field, who bristle at the company’s models potentially using their work — and at the implied expectation that they should do the hard labor unpacking and verifying the AI model’s sometimes nearly incomprehensible proofs.
A group called the Association for Human Mathematics released a statement blasting OpenAI’s release, which was then reshared, and effectively endorsed, by the Fields Medal-winning mathematician Terence Tau, a major figure in the community.
“Mathematicians have a particular vision of progress that is informed by history and field-specific considerations,” the statement began. “We reject OpenAI’s assertion that this release advances our subject, and we urge mathematicians and the public to view the value of this publication model with due skepticism.”
“Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship,” it added, “but a demonstration of power.”
In an announcement accompanying the release of the documents, OpenAI touted its own efforts to improve how it shares results with the math community, and said it has been consulting with an independent body of experts in the field called the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence.
What OpenAI chose to leave out, however, was that the Advisory Group was against OpenAI’s decision to continue testing its proprietary models on advanced math problems, with the group noting how the models remain inaccessible to the scientific community.
“We want to state clearly from the start: we do not endorse this practice, and we ask them to stop testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary models,” it said in a statement released at the end of last month.
The AHM, in its recent statement, criticized OpenAI for blowing off the Advisory Group’s advice while using it to “derive its legitimacy” in the field.
“In ignoring the central premise of the Advisory Group’s position, OpenAI has indicated total disregard for the norms of scientific research — norms that guarantee that mathematics remains trustworthy, ethically researched, and in the public interest,” the AHM said.
OpenAI’s mathematical proofs have been verified using a programming language called Lean. But while they may be technically sound, the actual utility of the findings remains to be seen, as the proofs are at times nearly unintelligible to humans. Beyond questions over whether the AI work will advance the field and contribute to human understanding of math’s mysteries, it also means that these same mathematicians are now expected to do the actual dirty work of unpacking the hundreds of proofs that OpenAI churned out and released all at once.
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