Mathematics has changed. Let's act like it
- ID
- 41845
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 02 Nov 2026, 2:28 AM
- Fetched
- 02 Nov 2026, 8:51 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/11/01/mathematics-has-changed-lets-act-like-it/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 5.5
- Created
- 02 Nov 2026, 8:52 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnersvibe_coders
What happened
This is a guest post by Frank Calegari on Terence Tao's blog arguing that mathematics has changed after OpenAI's October 6 release of over 700 research papers. Calegari says AI is now capable of groundbreaking math contributions, but criticizes the papers as atrociously written, violating attribution norms, and sometimes wrong, while quoting Hugo Duminil-Copin's complaint that every major open problem he had mentioned was claimed proved. The post urges mathematicians to focus on what they control—hiring, publishing, and training—and cites Gorenstein's 1972 finite-simple-groups program as a historical precedent.
Why it matters
If you publish AI-assisted technical docs, research notes, or code explanations, this is a concrete warning: the post says OpenAI's 700-paper release violated attribution expectations and included wrong results, so add a named-author review and citation check before shipping AI-generated material. For Malaysian teams, volume of AI output is not the same as publishable work.
Discussion angle
What minimum attribution and correctness checklist should a team require before publishing AI-generated technical writing, given Calegari's criticism of the 700-paper OpenAI dump?