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OpenAI's 700-manuscript proof release stalls where mathematicians have to check it
What happened
- Several mathematicians said simply working through the roughly 40-page table of contents and abstracts took them the better part of an hour. "Just going over the entire list of abstracts is overwhelming," said Alvaro Lozano-Robledo, a professor of mathematics at the University of Connecticut.
- Kevin Buzzard, a mathematics professor at Imperial College London, identified numerous theorems in his area, algebraic number theory, of which only around six immediately stood out; few, if any, of those appeared to be formally verified in Lean.
- "Hence, I either have to read possibly-not-correct slop, or wait for others to do the same, or wait for someone to formalise them before I can say for sure that the results are even correct."
Why it matters
OpenAI released more than 700 AI-generated math manuscripts on October 6, claiming solutions to hundreds of open problems. Only about 42 percent were formalized in Lean, The Verge reported, so specialists trust what they can verify and wait on the rest.
Confirmed8 publishers40 sourced claims9 min read
