{"id":795296,"date":"2026-10-07T22:56:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T22:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/795296\/"},"modified":"2026-10-07T22:56:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T22:56:12","slug":"openai-posts-700-maths-preprints-online-mathematicians-are-up-in-arms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/795296\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI posts 700 maths preprints online: mathematicians are up in arms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <img decoding=\"async\" class=\"figure__image\" alt=\"A group of three researchers in conversation are illuminated by projected mathematical formulae.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/d41586-026-03196-8_53820024.jpg\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"figure__caption u-sans-serif\">More than 700 preprints in various fields of mathematics were posted simultaneously by OpenAI.Credit: Monty Rakusen\/DigitalVision via Getty<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Although some mathematicians celebrated the solution of longstanding problems, others took to social media to complain about being scooped. Some were incensed at what <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=15896\" data-track=\"click\" data-label=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=15896\" data-track-category=\"body text link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">one physicist called a \u2018slopocalypse\u2019<\/a>, even if the mathematical content could end up being formally correct. <\/p>\n<p>The sheer number of papers posted at the same time is \u201cstaggering\u201d, <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/mathandcobb\/status\/2107643298873569692\" data-track=\"click\" data-label=\"https:\/\/x.com\/mathandcobb\/status\/2107643298873569692\" data-track-category=\"body text link\" rel=\"nofollow\">wrote<\/a> Alvaro Lozano-Robledo, a mathematician at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, wrote on the social-media platform X. \u201cWhy is OpenAI trying to solve hundreds of math problems to be released all at once?\u201d, he added.<\/p>\n<p>In an e-mail to Nature, a spokesperson for OpenAI wrote that the company\u2019s goal is to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-026-03028-9\" data-track=\"click\" data-label=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-026-03028-9\" data-track-category=\"body text link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">provide tools<\/a> for mathematicians and scientists. \u201cTo accomplish this, we evaluate and develop our models against difficult frontier problems in all sciences.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-026-02910-w\" class=\"u-link-inherit\" data-track=\"select_article\" data-track-action=\"view recommended article\" data-track-context=\"related article widget on news body\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"recommended__image\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/d41586-026-03196-8_53794656.jpg\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"recommended__title u-serif\">Who gets credit in the AI era? OpenAI maths bombshell sparks debate<\/p>\n<p><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Levent Alp\u00f6ge, a mathematician at rival company Anthropic, also in San Francisco, <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/__alpoge__\/status\/2107616859595981117\" data-track=\"click\" data-label=\"https:\/\/x.com\/__alpoge__\/status\/2107616859595981117\" data-track-category=\"body text link\" rel=\"nofollow\">commented<\/a> on X that there will be \u201csad stories\u201d for some mathematicians who might find their research projects pre-empted by the OpenAI release. \u201cWe should put that aside for today though. It\u2019s obviously the most significant moment in mathematical history,\u201d he wrote, because it shows how quickly the technology has become useful to mathematicians. <\/p>\n<p>Prized problems<\/p>\n<p>The large batch of preprints did not include any solutions to the five remaining \u2018Millennium Prize Problems\u2019, selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute, which has its scientific headquarters in Oxford, UK, at the turn of the twenty-first century. (OpenAI\u2019s preprint on the Navier-Stokes equation, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-026-02842-5\" data-track=\"click\" data-label=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-026-02842-5\" data-track-category=\"body text link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">released<\/a> in September, solved one of the original seven problems. Another one was solved by mathematicians in the early 2000s.)<\/p>\n<p>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, \u201cWe will leave it to the broader community to assess [their] significance.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than 700 preprints in various fields of mathematics were posted simultaneously by OpenAI.Credit: Monty Rakusen\/DigitalVision via Getty&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":795297,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,4230,11376,11959,4231,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-795296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","tag-machine-learning","tag-mathematics-and-computing","tag-multidisciplinary","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/795297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}