OpenAI says it's no longer sponsoring Caltech's math hackathon, where participants use AI to solve research problems, following criticism of “slop mathematics”
The latest math problem OpenAI is trying to solve is a bunch of angry mathematicians.
Business InsiderTruman Dickerson
Context & Ripple Effects
Mathematics had become a prominent test bed for AI reasoning: researchers argued in February that newer reasoning models were making the tools more useful in the field, while the Leiden Declaration's warning on accuracy and reliability set out mathematicians’ concerns about their use.
The sponsorship withdrawal lands amid a sharper dispute over the standards for AI-assisted research. OpenAI’s acknowledgment that de-identified data from two mathematicians’ product use may have aided model improvement had already brought questions of research participation and consent into the debate.
First-order effects
Caltech’s Mathathon loses OpenAI’s financial and institutional backing as organizers face criticism over encouraging AI use on research problems.
OpenAI distances its brand from a format that critics characterize as producing low-quality AI-generated mathematical work.
Second-order effects
Academic contest organizers and AI labs face stronger pressure to define acceptable AI assistance, verification requirements and attribution rules before attaching sponsorship or compute access.
Mathematicians’ concerns move beyond model capability to the incentives around deploying models on open problems, making community acceptance a constraint on AI research partnerships.
Third-order effects
If objections to AI-generated mathematical output continue to affect sponsorships, access to difficult research problems will increasingly depend on governance and proof-validation norms set with the mathematical community.
The episode points toward a split between demonstrating reasoning-model performance and earning legitimacy for AI-assisted discovery in disciplines where correctness and provenance are central.
The trend: AI labs are treating mathematics as a reasoning benchmark, while mathematicians are pushing for stronger norms governing quality, provenance and incentives around AI-assisted research.
@ben_golub Whether this is reasonable depends entirely on whether you think the stuff being stigmatized is bad. If it is, then the claim is just “OpenAI shouldn't financially incentivize students to do bad things they will later be judged for”.
I don't want to say too much about this open letter against the Mathathon, but the logic here (by a group of mathematicians) is really something: “It's very uncaring of you to help young people engage with this technology, since we might stigmatize them for it.”
😂 So Caltech undergrads wanted to, like barbarians at the gate, use their AI credits to destroy open math problems, but one thousand older, senior mathematicians, the established ones with Fields medals and honors under their belt were absolutely outraged that these tyros, these …
Im going on the record here as saying this is a shame. I applied, along with my friends, and I was looking forward to attending and seeing what discoveries we could unearth.
If I understand correctly, some mathematicians are arguing in disguise that only they should be allowed to prompt AI on open problems otherwise they are not cared for. Never thought car dealership level protectionalism will emerge in the most intellectual community.
Thank you for sparing math academia the terror of undergrads getting access to the tool that's increasingly essential to modern math research. We can rest assured they'll all spend the next 6 years of their lives writing pencil and proofs and everything will go back to normal.
Math as a discipline started as a way to solve real world problems in abstract forms, now it's the play thing for the academics. What they want is for math to remain unsolved forever so they can justify their existence indefinitely, and keep receiving their brain teaser stimuli u…
The gatekeeping by certain people in mathematics and microeconomic theory (ones I know) is equally nauseating. What? You're an undergrad? You solved the Riemann hypothesis? I don't care—that's definitely AI slop, a pile of shit! What? You're a big Booth professor who writes two h…
@danintheory IMHO this reaction by you guys is really silly - arguments like the one the mathematicians made here should not be rewarded https://x.com/...
I'm not in the math community and so my opinions on this should be discounted, but I would be extremely appreciative of the opportunity to blow a bunch of credits tinkering with frontier models in my area of interest and I think it's a shame to crush that for these undergrads
We recognize that the rapid progress of AI in mathematics is disruptive. We're looking to engage with the math community more on the best way to integrate this technology and communicate its impacts. After considering concerns raised by members of the mathematics community, we've…
OpenAI is pulling free credits for math undergrads in a math marathon, basically because career mathematicians have hurt egos over recent developments this will happen 100x in science and medicine and all other fields for the exact same reasons
@danintheory lol, ignore the whinging twats, all mathematicians build on the work of others. Just press forward for the good of humanity, we don't need to coddle those whose feathers are ruffled.
After nearly a decade of work, a team of researchers has re-proved the four-color theorem, a problem with a long history of false starts and dashed hopes. Their method opens up the potential for progress on many other stubborn problems in graph theory. — www.quantamagazine.org…
In its Wednesday night statement, OpenAI said: “In addition, since the completion of Navier-Stokes, we have made substantial progress on another Millennium Prize problem. …
In its Wednesday night statement, OpenAI said: “In addition, since the completion of Navier-Stokes, we have made substantial progress on another Millennium Prize problem. …