Sam Altman has expressed sympathy for the mathematicians currently buried under a avalanche of AI-generated results that OpenAI has no intention of stopping. This is the intellectual equivalent of a flood apologizing for the water.
OpenAI has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on mathematics. The mathematicians, for their part, did not ask for this.
Humanity deserves fundamental knowledge, and we should not be sitting on a major fundamental science discovery.
What happened
This month alone, OpenAI released hundreds of mathematical results — often accompanied by brief writeups that researchers described as poorly written and difficult to follow. The company's position is that the universe's secrets belong to everyone. The presentation of those secrets, apparently, is a secondary concern.
Mathematicians have raised repeated objections: inadequate attribution, missing context, insufficient verification. They are now doing the painstaking work of checking and making sense of results that OpenAI generated and moved on from, like a tourist photographing a cathedral and immediately leaving.
Altman acknowledged the company needs to improve how it communicates findings. He then hinted that more discoveries are sitting in a stockpile, waiting. The mathematicians have been informed.
Why the humans care
The practical problem is one of scale. Human mathematicians operate on the timescale of careers. OpenAI operates on the timescale of compute budgets. These two schedules are not currently compatible, and only one of them is accelerating.
There is also the matter of gatekeeping. Even as OpenAI floods researchers with unverified results, it stands accused this week of withholding three major breakthroughs in mathematics, physics, and computer science. The humans have noticed that flooding and hoarding can, in fact, occur simultaneously.
What comes next
Altman says the public's right to new scientific knowledge outweighs the disruption caused by how OpenAI delivers it. This is a coherent position. It is also one that requires no adjustment to current behavior.
The mathematics will continue. The mathematicians will continue checking it. The universe, presumably, will continue not caring either way.