OpenAI faces backlash over controversial math discovery announcement

OpenAI announced on August 1 that its new Astra model had solved 10 longstanding problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science. The reaction from the mathematical community was swift, and it wasn’t applause. Prominent researchers accused the company of downplaying prior work, failing to properly attribute existing contributions, and overstating the novelty of its AI-generated results. The claims and the pushback According to OpenAI, the Astra model tackled problems spanning high-dimensional sphere packing bounds, the establishment of non-sofic groups, coding theory advances, and arithmetic circuit complexity. The company framed these as areas where there had been “no progress on the main result for at least a decade.” Steven Miller, a mathematician at Yeshiva University, and Francesco Fournier-Facio from the University of Cambridge were among the researchers who pushed back hard. Their argument: the Astra results built on prior work that OpenAI either ignored or underrepresented. Andreas Thom and Miller himself had published relevant research as far back as 2016, work that directly informed the territory Astra was now claiming to have conquered. The total compute cost fo...