OpenAI Says a Secret AI Model Cracked Hundreds of Open Math Problems in One Prompt—Mathematicians Want Receipts

In brief

• OpenAI published 722 math manuscripts in 372 result families on GitHub from an unreleased internal model.
• Only 162 of the 722 papers have a Lean-formalized main result, and OpenAI warns that some unformalized results could have issues.
• MIT's Andrew Sutherland says the one-prompt, single-agent claim is unverified until the model is released, and the release omits the prompts that an advisory group at the Institute for Advanced Study recommended disclosing.

OpenAI published 722 math manuscripts on GitHub on Tuesday, all produced by an internal model the company has not released. An OpenAI spokesperson said almost everything came from a single prompt handed to a single AI agent, though some may have taken multiple attempts.

It's a bold claim and a potentially significant breakthrough in the field of mathematics. But not everyone is a fan, or buying the hype.

“Until and unless they release the model and people can replicate their results, I think you should treat any claims about one-shotting problems with a single agent as unverified,” Andrew Sutherland, a mathematician at MIT, told Scientific American. “We should ask for receipts,” he said.

The papers are grouped into 372 “families” of related results, and a family can bundle a main theorem with companion arguments, consequences or alternative proofs. That makes 722 a count of manuscripts, not of solved problems. OpenAI says it posed roughly 4,000 problems to the model and kept the outputs it judged significant enough to publish.