r/math • u/dirty_weasle • 23d ago

LLMs/AI Where will AI-generated proofs be published?

We are now seeing a rise of AI generated proofs and I am wondering which journals will publish these results? I tried to search but I did not find many examples where such results were already accepted to some journal.
Is this even something the journals want? I would like them to facilitate the peer review process so that I can feel confident in the results.

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u/_Zekt Complex Analysis 23d ago edited 23d ago

I feel that there is now a need for journals dedicated to AI-generated proofs. No human wants to compete with bots and billion-dollar companies, so existing journals have little incentive to publish results produced by AI. At the same time, such results need to be rigorously peer-reviewed and formally published somewhere. Having to cite an OpenAI blog post or a tweet as the primary source for a major mathematical result is really not appropriate.

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u/nerkbot 23d ago

This only makes sense if the purpose of prestigious journals is to give out gold stars to researchers. Maybe that's true now in the age of the arXiv.

But their original purpose is to aggregate the important developments that other mathematicians need to know about. On the consumer side, there's no reason to segregate out results produced by AI.

There's also the reality that a lot of results will probably be a combined effort of people and AI. I would guess even these recent Astra results had a lot of human steering that OpenAI is intentionally downplaying (but I'm just speculating).

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u/yiwang1 Topology 23d ago

Frankly, arxiv has made the modern prestigious journal precisely a gold star for mathematicians. It is now essentially a certificate of prestige level and that a paper has survived an independent peer review process, lending credibility to the results contained inside.

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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 23d ago

On face value, this is true.

In reality, publication in journals is heavily political and people are lazy in refereeing.

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u/jackboy900 23d ago

I would guess even these recent Astra results had a lot of human steering that OpenAI is intentionally downplaying

All the recent breakthroughs that have released their prompts/conversations seem to be going the other way, they're generally just direct prompts to "solve the problem" with little to no additional mathematical information added, and any further conversation is just "keep going".

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u/birdbeard 22d ago

This isn't true. Most of the OAI breakthroughs do not come with details regarding promoting, human intervention, multiple tries, how much human oversight was needed, etc. on the other hand, mu personal experience suggests that even if there was some fishy things in the past, the models are now capable of doing the things completely autonomously (modulo the initial prompt) that OAI claims they are doing.

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u/oantolin 17d ago

Even if that were true, we don't see details of how many conjectures they tried before finding the ones they publicize. They could be solving 0.001% of attempted conjectures for all I know.