"How much beauty have we lost?" Mathematicians react with shock and disgust as OpenAI bulldozes their field
By Matthias Bastian, The Decoder
Picture: The Decoder
Mathematicians worldwide are reacting to OpenAI's mass release of hundreds of claimed proofs. More than a hundred researchers have shared their responses, ranging from intellectual fascination to deep grief over a lost way of working. AI models have long struggled with math. Just a few years ago, they failed at problems that advanced students could solve routinely. But breakthroughs have been piling up since mid-2026. First came the Unit Distance Conjecture, then Navier-Stokes, then ten solutions presented at the unveiling of OpenAI's Astra model. OpenAI went much further on October 6, 2026. The company released more than 700 manuscripts at once, claiming solutions to hundreds of open math problems. The math blog Proofs and Prompts then collected over 100 responses from researchers.
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