OpenAI's math data dump wiped out early-career researchers' programs, professor says

OpenAI's release of more than 700 AI-generated mathematical manuscripts has wiped out research programs belonging to early-career mathematicians, according to Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematics professor at New York University.

"So we've had whole research programs wiped out on Tuesday by their dump," Buckmaster told CNBC's "Squawk Box," according to Business Insider.

Buckmaster also raised questions about whether unpublished work had contributed to OpenAI's results. He noted that researchers routinely submit proposals to funding panels, and that panelists sometimes enter summaries of that work into large language models. "You have to understand, they have access to all our research proposals," he said, according to Business Insider.

OpenAI posted the manuscripts to GitHub on October 6, describing them as the output of an internal model not yet available to outside users. The company said many of the proofs include computer-checkable versions, along with revision and citation protocols. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Northwestern University mathematics professor Bryna Kra said in an interview with Business Insider that the sheer volume of the release posed a danger to the collaborative spirit that defines the field. "Mathematics is an extraordinarily collaborative field," Kra said. "There is nobody at this company who could possibly give a talk or answer technical questions about any of these results." She warned that mathematicians could become more secretive if they fear that ideas shared informally might be absorbed by AI before publication.

Ursula Martin, a mathematician at the University of Oxford, described the release as "tossing the community a messy first draft and expecting us to clean it up for them," according to Nature. Alvaro Lozano-Robledo, a number theorist at the University of Connecticut, wrote on X $TWTR 0.00% that the volume of papers posted simultaneously was "staggering" and asked why the company had bundled so many results into a single drop, according to Nature.

Not all mathematicians viewed the release negatively. Alex Kontorovich, a distinguished mathematics professor at Rutgers University, told Business Insider that mathematical training could grow more valuable as AI reshapes academia. "Mathematics first and foremost teaches people to think clearly and deeply and for extended periods of time on big problems," Kontorovich said. "And I think in the future there will be even more demand for such skills."

OpenAI's math release came after a period of friction between the company and the mathematics community. The company's publication of 722 papers organized into 372 groups followed its claimed solution to the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, which drew disputes over attribution and an open letter from more than two dozen Fields Medal recipients warning that the industry's approach threatened to undermine mathematics as a field. Questions about data use had also surfaced earlier: Andreas Thom, a mathematician whose work overlaps with one of OpenAI's announced results, accused the company of "dishonesty" over its handling of questions about whether his ChatGPT interactions contributed to its model's outputs.

OpenAI said it plans to fund workshops and conferences focused on AI-generated mathematical results and is working to release the model that produced the papers.