More than 700 preprints in various fields of mathematics were posted simultaneously by OpenAI.Credit: Monty Rakusen/DigitalVision via Getty
The research community is in uproar after OpenAI released a trove of more than 700 mathematical preprints entirely generated by AI on 6 October. The San Francisco, California-based maker of ChatGPT posted the preprints on the software repository Github.
Although some mathematicians celebrated the solution of longstanding problems, others took to social media to complain about being scooped. Some were incensed at what one physicist called a ‘slopocalypse’, even if the mathematical content could end up being formally correct.
The sheer number of papers posted at the same time is “staggering”, wrote Alvaro Lozano-Robledo, a mathematician at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, wrote on the social-media platform X. “Why is OpenAI trying to solve hundreds of math problems to be released all at once?”, he added.
In an e-mail to Nature, a spokesperson for OpenAI wrote that the company’s goal is to provide tools for mathematicians and scientists. “To accomplish this, we evaluate and develop our models against difficult frontier problems in all sciences.”
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Levent Alpöge, a mathematician at rival company Anthropic, also in San Francisco, commented on X that there will be “sad stories” for some mathematicians who might find their research projects pre-empted by the OpenAI release. “We should put that aside for today though. It’s obviously the most significant moment in mathematical history,” he wrote, because it shows how quickly the technology has become useful to mathematicians.
Prized problems
The large batch of preprints did not include any solutions to the five remaining ‘Millennium Prize Problems’, selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute, which has its scientific headquarters in Oxford, UK, at the turn of the twenty-first century. (OpenAI’s preprint on the Navier-Stokes equation, released in September, solved one of the original seven problems. Another one was solved by mathematicians in the early 2000s.)
Still, some of the preprints were on problems related to those five, including the Hodge conjecture on complex algebraic varieties and the Riemann hypothesis on the statistical properties of prime numbers. The spokesperson for OpenAI said, “We will leave it to the broader community to assess [their] significance.”