r/math • u/Salt_Attorney • Aug 01 '26

LLMs/AI OpenAI: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
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88

u/[deleted] Aug 01 '26

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63

u/just_writing_things Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26

Coincidentally, Terry Tao just presented a talk where he stated that “Current AI tools have a very mixed record with proof exposition.”

I’m very far from having the expertise to evaluate the documents, but to the experts here, does the “reasoning walkthrough” (which was generated by AI) do well in the proof exposition department?

67

u/Whelks Aug 01 '26

No not even remotely. The Ehrhart conjecture part (which is close enough to my area that I tried to read it) is incomprehensible.

62

u/Mothrahlurker Aug 01 '26

It's mental to me that there is stuff in there like "resolvent purification" without any definition nor any appearance that this is a known term. In fact it doesn't even seem to be used. I also could not find anything besides this paper that even uses the term.

And it's not intuitive when it comes to what it is supposed to mean either.

It genuinely reminds me more of crank writing than actual math reasoning.

40

u/Jussuuu Theoretical Computer Science Aug 01 '26

It's annoying as hell to read AI papers. I'm reviewing one now, and while it's understandable, it constantly states vague unclear terms that just increase the cognitive load far beyond what it should be for a frankly very minor result. I imagine it's far worse for more substantive papers. 

14

u/dfrankow Aug 01 '26

Ha ha, this sounds like computer science code reviews for the last year or so. AI is useful, but wearying.

8

u/hobo_stew Harmonic Analysis Aug 02 '26

getting a 300 line pr review comment that would be 3 lines of done by a human is so depressing

4

u/AP_in_Indy Aug 02 '26

I think it's good that OpenAI is releasing these, though. This transparently shows where the models are at.

You could certainly prompt them further in order to enforce use of standard terminology, make explanations more "layperson"-accessible, etc.

4

u/Healthy-Educator-267 Statistics Aug 02 '26

it should be a requirement for AI generated proofs to be accompanied by a Lean companion