OpenAI Dumps 377 New Math Results on GitHub, Publishes Hand-Wringing Blog Post

On Tuesday, OpenAI continued its all-out assault on mathematicians’ peace of mind and sense of career stability by releasing 377 new math results in the form of an info-dump on GitHub.

What kinds of accomplishments is OpenAI claiming now? Well, one paper chosen at random claims to have proven “the full Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer leading term formula.” So that’s pretty good. But don’t get to excited because apparently it’s only for the elliptical curves over ℚ, and even then, only when their full “q-power Selmer group has a corank zero or one at some prime q,” sorry to say.

As the nights and weekends editor at Gizmodo I’m not remotely qualified to evaluate any of this—neither to debunk it, nor to hype it as 377 amazing math breakthroughs.

An accompanying OpenAI blog post seems to anticipate that experts are not going to love this. The authors seek to reassure the community that their company wants “to directly empower scientists with state-of-the-art capabilities,” and says OpenAI is “working to responsibly release the model that produced these results.“

The post indicates that the model in question is the same internal, unreleased model that produced an exception disproving the Navier-Stokes equations about a month ago. It later emerged that OpenAI had  swooped in and finished work being done by another team of mathematicians who were also using AI, though that doesn’t necessarily invalidate the answer OpenAI found.