OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician

NYU mathematics professor Tristan Buckmaster announced three proofs on Tuesday with a preliminary finding on one of the major unsolved problems in theoretical mathematics. The findings, made in collaboration with Anthropic mathematician Levent Alpöge and using both Codex and Claude AI models, are significant in themselves — but they’re also accompanied by an unusual controversy surrounding OpenAI’s attempts to solve the same problem.

“There is another part of this story,” Buckmaster wrote in his statement announcing the proofs, “and one that, honestly, I very much wish I did not have to be concerned with.”

While Buckmaster and Alpöge were finalizing their results, they learned that “information about our progress had been passed to OpenAI.” When they contacted OpenAI about this, they were told that OpenAI had already achieved a full proof of the central problem. But when they asked followup questions about when OpenAI had begun its research into the problem and how much human input was involved, the answers became more evasive.

“It emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem,” Buckmaster says,” and that an insane amount of compute had been used…. Eventually, it was agreed that [the first prompt] had been sent in the past few days, after information about our work had reached OpenAI.”