Yet another Hacker News

'Breathtaking,' 'Devastating': Mathematics Reels After New OpenAI Release

9 points marojejian 2 hours ago 13 comments

marojejian 2 hours ago | parent

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/science/mathematicians-re...

>If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked.

- Alex Kontorovich, chair of the department of mathematics at Rutgers

Iolaum 1 hour ago | parent

Not your fault - and thanks for the gift link - but NYT still wanted me to login to read it.

Their prerogative, but no thanks.

marojejian 1 hour ago | parent

I get this comment so often when I post NYT gift links now, I guess I should always include the archive link to prevent them:

https://archive.is/ANnky

pxx 22 minutes ago | parent

um, actually, one question must still be asked, as the Fields requires its recipient to be under 40 at some point in the year it is awarded

ChrisArchitect 1 hour ago | parent

Reactions to 100 Solutions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50019499

flounderXM 1 hour ago | parent

Is it paywalled just for me?

iosguyryan 12 minutes ago | parent

I pay, but always get a half screen popover asking me to upgrade to a family membership.

novaRom 1 hour ago | parent

I wonder how many chat logs they did use in model's training data? If model consumes human’s reasoning (the chat logs) and then presents results as its own, it's a kind of parasite right?

Harvesting collective output of human consciousness to build AI that then replaces the very people who provided the input.

shadowgovt 54 minutes ago | parent

Replacement isn't bad as long as it doesn't strip people of dignity, and that's the tricky part.

Google, in a large sense, replaced librarians, service desks, 411, and many other specialist people and services whose purpose was "The knowledge is somewhere, and there is an index, but most people don't know where the index is or how to read it."

But librarians aren't really diminished as a result (while service desks may have kind of quietly evaporated to go do something else).

If the system becomes "People talk about mathematics and then an analysis engine reads that zeitgeist much faster than people can and pulls it all together into new insights," that's not apriori bad... Except that we have to consider how many people were in that conversation because their ultimate goal is to have an insight tied directly to them, i.e. to become the Hamilton in "Hamiltonian operator." Because the reality is that people practice mathematics both to advance the sum total of human knowledge and to roll the dice on getting stamped into the history books as the closest form of immortality that people get, and we can't just ignore both drives.

Grant Sanderson (3blue1brown) expressed thoughts on this topic space in a recent video, where he suggested one possible shift might be from the focus in the field being on frontier-pushing to the focus being on making the frontier more "human-shaped." There's a huge gap between higher math and what most people understand, and possibly ample opportunity to bridge it.

sseagull 55 minutes ago | parent

While I see lots of discussion about AI solving these problems, I feel like there's a more sinister undercurrent that's is less discussed - about who did the solving. It wasn't academics empowered by AI, but OpenAI themselves.

I feel like it's a sign of what's to come - large AI companies with resources academia never had, at some point deciding that selling access to AI is not as important as just doing the research themselves with models inaccessible to anyone else. The end game is all scientific advancement will be done by one or two companies, who will reap all the profits. Why would they give access to a model that develops a cure for cancer when they could develop the cure themselves and get all the money?

(Kind of like Amazon coming out with their own products - use the greater community for ideas, then become a competitor at a scale they often cannot match).

weard_beard 42 minutes ago | parent

I feel it would be effective and prudent to protest the current use of AI and to effectively unionize and ostracize AI use until many of these demands are met. The companies that own the models and the infrastructure will never be more vulnerable. They have fired a salvo. Fire Back.

alphabeta3r56 40 minutes ago | parent

Mathematics is much easier that way to train. Science in general. Governments will again need to become powerhouses of resources for compute to generate public research.

perching_aix 4 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]