OpenAI 一次性发布 700 余篇 AI 生成的数学预印本，数学界强烈反弹

The research community is in uproar after OpenAI released a trove of more than 700 mathematical preprints entirely generated by artificial intelligence on 6 October. The ChatGPT maker based in San Francisco, California, posted the preprints on the software repository Github.

Although some mathematicians celebrated the solution of long-standing problems, others took to social media to complain about being scooped. Some were incensed at what one mathematician called a slopocalypse, even if the mathematical content could end up being formally correct.

The sheer number of papers posted at the same time is “staggering”, wrote Alvaro Lozano-Robledo, a number theorist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, on the social-media platform X. “Why is OpenAI trying to solve hundreds of math problems to be released all at once?”, he added.

In an e-mail to Nature, a spokesperson for OpenAI wrote that the company’s goal is to provide tools for mathematicians and scientists. “To accomplish this, we evaluate and develop our models against difficult frontier problems in all sciences.”

Who gets credit in the AI era? OpenAI maths bombshell sparks debate

Levent Alpöge, a mathematician at rival company Anthropic, also in San Francisco, wrote on X that there will be “sad stories” for some researchers who might find their projects pre-empted by the OpenAI release. “We should put that aside for today though. It’s obviously the most significant moment in mathematical history,” he wrote, because it shows how quickly the technology has become useful to mathematicians.

Others say that a better approach would have been to collaborate with members of the mathematics community. Ursula Martin, a mathematician at the University of Oxford, UK, says that the publication of the preprints is instead “tossing the community a messy first draft and expecting us to clean it up for them”.

“I can't bring myself to spend my time studying [these preprints], so I will not be reading these papers,” says Michael Harris, a number theorist at Columbia University in New York City.

Prized problems

The large batch of preprints did not include any solutions to the five remaining Millennium Prize Problems, selected at the turn of the twenty-first century by the Clay Mathematics Institute, which has its scientific headquarters in Oxford, UK. (OpenAI’s preprint on the Navier-Stokes equation, released in September, solved one of the original seven problems. Another one was solved by mathematicians in the early 2000s.)