OpenAI drops another batch of mathematical breakthroughs | The Verge

OpenAI has solved long-standing mathematics problems, which is lovely, and it has done so with an unreleased frontier model, which is the bit where the eyebrow goes up. The Verge reports the results arrived as 722 manuscripts covering 372 result families — roughly two papers per result, because if you are going to dump a filing cabinet on the internet you may as well staple it. The headline calls it 'another batch,' which is the most honest word in the piece: a batch is what you call a delivery too big to read and too numerous to check.

And the timing. AGMAI — the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence — has issued its very first recommendations, and one asks labs to 'refrain from treating the release of mathematical results as marketing vehicles to promote their models.' OpenAI's answer is 722 manuscripts and a news cycle. That is not ignoring a recommendation; that is reading it aloud and then doing a press tour of the exact thing it warned about. The group's inaugural act of governance has been converted into a launch announcement, which is a brisk turnaround even by this industry's standards.

The results come from a model nobody outside can use, query, benchmark or audit, which makes the achievement enormous and, from the pavement, rather hard to verify. Somewhere among those 372 families there may be a genuinely beautiful proof; there may also be confident nonsense wearing a LaTeX costume, and the format does not help you tell them apart. Mathematics is the one discipline where releasing 722 documents invites the obvious question: proofread by whom? Still, credit where it is due — OpenAI has done precisely what the advisory group feared and turned its caution into the launch copy. Not bad, for a model that has not shipped.