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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

The question is why the situation is what it is. Did OpenAI publish a large volume of unreadable proofs because that was their best attempt to contribute to the field of mathematics? Or does OpenAI feel that it’s more profitable for them if people come to see mathematics as something that’s less focused on understanding and more focused on using AI to generate proofs?

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Even with humans, the first publication is rarely the best expression of the lesson. Getting published does more than establish priority; it also frees up the community to build on the result. Nobody expects a human to wait until the proof is comprehensible to anyone except themselves and the referees.

I don’t think that’s true? I never did research math myself, but the people I’ve known who do would definitely invest time in making a proof clearer and better even if they had the idea basically correct. There’ve been multiple recent stories of researchers saying “we’re going to publish this lame proof that isn’t up to our standards because the AI companies let us know they’re going to scoop us if we don’t”.

Mathematicians care a lot about the exposition of their ideas, invest a lot of time in giving talks, writing, and don't publish too frequently, compared to other sciences.

They normally don't feel like they are in some kind of race to publish the results ASAP and claim priority. Cases like that are very rare (but they get media coverage because they are so unusual).

OpenAI did a publicity stunt, their motivation is not to make a good contribution to the field, which has very different standards and culture, compared to the AI labs.

Yes, I guess it matters a lot whether this was quite close to the best they could do or the best they could do given specific resource constraints or whether they just didn’t bother to try doing better (eg to invest more tokens into readable papers)?

> I guess it matters a lot whether this was quite close to the best they could do

As the author of the post points out, there is no way this is “the best they could do”. It’s a write up that didn’t involve someone with the math + communication skills required to clearly explain the result.

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