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John Carlos Baez@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz (2026-09-23 23:00:36)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/999167/openai-elite-mathematicians-panel

OpenAI claims to have proved 100 more big theorems.  I urge all of you to fill out the form at https://agmai.org/ and politely ask the board of nine "elite mathematicians" to initiate a more democratic approach to dealing with this potential flood of AI-proved results.

Here's what I wrote in that form:

"The answer to this question is so important that it should be decided, not directly by just nine mathematicians, but in some more democratic way. You can design the structure for decision-making and perhaps keep the resulting organization from running off the rails, but the more the affected mathematicians have some say in what happens, the less unhappy they will be. There already exist democratically run organizations of mathematicians such as the AMS, LMS, and EMS that might help out here."
---Reply---
Thomas Kahle@tomkalei@mathe.social (2026-09-24 02:46:37)
@johncarlosbaez 

Why do you think mathematicians should engage with OpenAI at all after what happened / is still happening? 

Why do “we” mathematicians need to give them input?

Feels like talking with the schoolyard bully about “our problems and how to resolve them”. 

I think we also have the option to ignore them. Let them dump their 100 theoremoids on the Arxiv or their homepage and then we’ll see. 

This is how science works. Anybody can post anything and then peer review and so on…

---Replies---

John Carlos Baez@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz (2026-09-24 03:02:10)
@tomkalei - if OpenAI publishes 100 proofs of big theorems - verified using Lean, but not carefully written and not properly citing previous work - it'll be worse than if mathematicians have a chance to take this work, see what they think about it, and turn it into properly written mathematics before it's released.

You say "we also have the option to ignore them", but few mathematicians working on a field where the blah-di-blah conjecture is a central open question will simply "ignore" a proof or disproof, verified using Lean, of this conjecture.  Some may ignore it.  But others will will go on and use this new result, and those who ignore it will be left in the dust of history.  Publicly available facts don't usually disappear, and boycotting a fact doesn't work well.