OpenAI says it's no longer sponsoring Caltech's math hackathon, where participants use AI to solve research problems, following criticism of “slop mathematics”
and Kill Us AllTom McKay /Gizmodo:OpenAI Is Beefing With Mathematicians, Will No Longer Sponsor Caltech ‘Mathathon’Andrew Cullen /SingularityHub:OpenAI Claims Another Huge Mathematical Result Amid Fights Over Credit, Ethics, and PrivacyThe Week:The controversy over OpenAI's maths miracleCam Wilson /ABC:Racing to solve maths problems now ‘pointless’, says Australian at centre of OpenAI controversyProofs and Prompts:Open Letter about the MathathonProofs and Prompts:A response from Mathathon — Ma
Business InsiderTruman Dickerson
Context & Ripple Effects
The sponsorship dispute lands after sixteen mathematicians used the Leiden Declaration on AI and Mathematics to raise concerns about AI’s accuracy and reliability in the field. That gives the criticism a broader professional context rather than treating it as a disagreement over one event.
It also follows OpenAI’s statement that it [[a:1286663|could not rule out de-identified data from mathematicians’ product use contributed to model improvement]], connecting questions of research credit and data use to the debate over AI-assisted problem solving.
First-order effects
Caltech’s Mathathon loses OpenAI as a sponsor, while OpenAI creates distance between its brand and an event criticized over AI-generated mathematics.
The withdrawal makes OpenAI’s relationship with mathematicians a reputational issue tied to how AI-derived results are validated and credited.
Second-order effects
Mathathon organizers must replace the sponsorship, and prospective backers inherit the controversy over whether AI access and output-review practices are acceptable for research competitions.
The Leiden Declaration’s concerns gain practical force for universities and AI labs: partnerships involving AI-assisted mathematics face greater pressure to define reliability and attribution standards.
Third-order effects
If research partnerships continue to break down over validation and credit, access to frontier models for mathematical work may be governed less by open experimentation and more by institutional review rules.
AI labs’ legitimacy in scientific fields will increasingly depend on whether researchers accept their methods for provenance, verification, and recognition—not only on claimed problem-solving capability.
The trend: AI-assisted science is moving from demonstrations of model capability toward disputes over the rules that make machine-generated research credible and institutionally legitimate.
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'…
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.
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…
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
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
😂 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 …
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.
@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”.
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.
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 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.
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.”
@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/...