OpenAI withdraws three mathematical results
- ID
- 33504
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 08 Oct 2026, 3:05 PM
- Fetched
- 09 Oct 2026, 10:47 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://twitter.com/danintheory/status/2108065033070789090
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 7.0
- Created
- 09 Oct 2026, 10:47 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnersai_agent_users
What happened
An OpenAI scientist announced a GitHub update to the openai/math repo: 6 new Lean formalizations, 19 modifications, and 3 withdrawals, leaving roughly 42% of top-line results formalized. The three withdrawn manuscripts are named as 'Algebraicity of Weil classes on split abelian eightfolds', 'Algebraicity of Kuga–Satake Correspondences for K3 Surfaces', and 'The rational Hodge conjecture for products of K3 surfaces'. The Hacker News thread drew 249 points and 545 comments, with replies pressing on why the results were released before checking.
Why it matters
The concrete number to carry away is the 42%: only about two in five top-line results in this repo are backed by a Lean formalization, and the rest — including the three now-withdrawn papers — were published on trust. If you cite, build on, or demo AI-assisted mathematical or logical output, treat 'not yet formalized' as 'not yet verified' and check the repo's history file before relying on a result. The 'proofs are shipping like software now' framing is the decision point: versioned repos with errata are a reasonable engineering practice, but they mean a proof claim can change under you between releases.
Discussion angle
Is a 42% formalization rate with published errata an acceptable way to ship mathematical results, or does a withdrawn 'proof' mean the original claim should never have been presented as one? And what would it take for you to trust an AI-assisted result without a Lean proof behind it?