this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
74 points (85.6% liked)

Technology

88803 readers
3716 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
74
‘Pure insanity’: Mathematicians will need years to make sense of OpenAI’s latest drop (www.theverge.com)
submitted 6 days ago by Mustachius_Grumpius@thelemmy.club to c/technology@lemmy.world
41 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (4 children)

But for all the slop and uncertainty, the overarching consensus is that the release contains some genuinely impressive work. While stressing the difficulties assessing the volume of material — and the need to properly verify the results — numerous researchers The Verge spoke to said the work appeared to be of a very high caliber, despite shortcomings in its presentation. In a pre-AI world, they said, many of OpenAI’s results would clearly have warranted publication in top-tier journals and could have been enough to secure an academic career for their authors. A handful were described as being the kind of work that could make a mathematician a serious contender for a Fields Medal, one of the discipline’s highest honors.

While some of it is slop, there appear to be genuine gems in there.

I feel like most of the commentors here didn't even bother reading the article. It's insane how so many of the mathematicians cited in the article are excited or anxious about developments, and most of the people in here are just declaring more AI slop.

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The issue is that some of those "gems" are just stolen research from real mathematicians.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 0 points 5 days ago

And others are actual gems. They're not mutually exclusive. It's ok to point out the problems while also acknowledging there's actual accomplishments.

[–] undefinedValue@programming.dev 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Agreed, but tbh even after reading the article I’m left scratching my head about the exact type of journalism on display here. The Verge is just going around eliciting hot takes from mathematicians who are completely overwhelmed with this drop - only 40% formalized in Lean and three retractions in only a few days.

The math community doesn’t know what to make of it, the verge doesn’t either but they feel the need to report something.. so they’re pressuring for comments when the only reasonable thing to do is to keep your head down and read more until you parse wtf it is this unknown model with an unknown prompt produced for an unknown field of mathematics with almost no apparent explanation or fleshed out ideas on how this could apply to current knowledge or problems.

So calling it slop, at least for the time being seems at least somewhat reasonable. Though some claimed that there were 10s of interesting papers among the 700.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago

The point is, there are plenty of mathematicians who have looked at some of the output and been impressed by it. Contrast that with the comments in here that are almost universally negative. One might think there was an unreasonable bias in our little echo chamber.

[–] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Its a real the boy who cried AGI problem. They are doing constant bullshit hype to keep investors so when they announce anything the assumption is bullshit hype. It doesn't help that their product is really really good at writing bullshit hype.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 0 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Yeah but I wish the crowd on lemmy would be a little less reddity and actually read the articles.

[–] REDACTED@infosec.pub 0 points 5 days ago

I'm a Lemmy user, I don't want to be objective, I only want to hate