OpenAI's new math advisory group will judge the results, not the pace
OpenAI says its model has resolved more than 100 open math problems. Nine mathematicians will now advise it on how to release the results, but not on pace.
Vlad Makarovreviewed and published
OpenAI now says an unreleased internal model has settled more than 100 long-standing open problems across most areas of mathematics, a figure published on September 21 with no list, no proofs and no per-result review status. The same post introduced a nine-member advisory group, hosted at the Institute for Advanced Study, that will help the company work out how to release those results to a community that has spent two weeks arguing this is precisely the wrong thing to optimise for. The group is unpaid, free to criticise, free to publish — and explicitly not the body deciding how fast OpenAI moves.
What OpenAI claims, and what the page does not show
The claim sits in the opening paragraph of the company's post, published on September 21:
"On August 28, we began training a new internal model. In addition to resolving the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem, this model has now resolved more than 100 long-standing open problems across most areas of mathematics."
The post adds that the pace of this progress "has surprised the mathematicians within OpenAI", and presents that surprise as the reason the page exists: the company says it needed to work out how to tell the field quickly and responsibly. What it leaves out is the material a mathematician would use to evaluate that sentence. There is no list of problems, no proofs, and no per-result status distinguishing a complete solution from a partial one, a special case, or a restatement of something already known. For the Navier–Stokes claim, OpenAI at least published a paper and a formalization, and we went through both on September 10. The remaining hundred-odd results arrive as a number and an adjective.
The nine names, and a membership list with a wrinkle
The group has its own site, agmai.org, hosted at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and both OpenAI's post and the site name the same nine initial members.
| Member | Affiliation |
|---|---|
| François Charles | ENS-PSL |
| Camillo De Lellis | IAS, GSSI |
| Timothy Gowers | Collège de France, Cambridge |
| Martin Hairer | EPFL, Imperial College London |
| Nikhil Srivastava | Berkeley, Simons Institute |
| Ulrike Tillmann | Oxford, INI |
| Ravi Vakil | Stanford |
| Edward Witten | IAS |
| Melanie Matchett Wood | Harvard |
One name is worth pausing on. Martin Hairer, a 2014 Fields medallist, appears both on the group's membership list and on the signatory list of the September 11 open letter whose complaints prompted the exercise. TechCrunch reported that only one member, Camillo De Lellis, had also signed it; read directly, the letter's own signatory list does not include De Lellis and does include Hairer, so that sentence is mistaken.
Independence, as the group defines it
OpenAI's terms are unusually specific. The group "will operate independently from OpenAI"; it may offer advice the company did not ask for, comment publicly on OpenAI's impact on mathematics and publish its conclusions; members are not paid; and the group controls its own membership. Then comes the carve-out: "the group will not be responsible for advising us on how to pace our internal progress on mathematics." The group states the same limit from its own side: its members "do not have decision making power at any AI company", and it is willing to advise any AI company whose models are likely to touch mathematics.
Its stated current task is narrow, and the wording is worth reading closely: the group describes itself as "advising OpenAI on how to coordinate the release of a large number of significant results in mathematics that they report have been produced by their internal model". The verb "report" is doing real work, since nothing on the site suggests the group has any independent sight of whether those results hold. Its input form, open to the mathematical community, is collecting suggestions on how such a release should be organised; none of the mandate is about checking mathematics.
The letter the group is answering
The letter, A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics, was published on September 11 and signed by 27 Fields medallists, among them Artur Avila, Simon Donaldson, Peter Scholze and Maryna Viazovska. Its argument is not that AI is bad at mathematics. It is that solving problems is a tool and a proxy for the field's actual goal, conceptual understanding, and that optimising the proxy can ruin the ground it grows in. The signatories warn that "the mass production at faster and faster pace of 'true/false' statements could destroy fertile ground instead of breathing life into new ideas", that solutions "announced in a rush" leave no time for a proper writeup or for citing the relevant earlier work of others, and that AI-conceived results "would never become fully alive" without the mathematicians who fold them into the canon.
OpenAI cites the letter by name and quotes its framing — "the goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathematical community are severely misaligned" — as the reason for the group. The group's task answers one clause of that complaint, the rush to announce. The carve-out answers none of it: on the pace itself, the letter's central charge, the advisers have been told in advance that they have no standing.
What has actually been checked so far
An outside assessment published the same day by Kingy AI reads the past four months as an evidence ladder, which is a useful way to see where the September 21 claim sits:
- May 20 — an AI-generated construction disproved the Erdős unit-distance conjecture, with an outside mathematician's companion account
- August 1 — ten mathematical and theoretical-computer-science advances released with arguments, reasoning walkthroughs and Lean certificates
- September 8 — the Navier–Stokes proof and its formalization published
- September 21 — the aggregate 100-plus claim, with no result-by-result evidence ledger on that page
Two institutional facts sit underneath that ladder. The Clay Mathematics Institute still lists Navier–Stokes as "Active", and its rules for a Millennium Prize require publication in a qualifying outlet, a two-year wait after publication and general acceptance by the community. A Lean certificate, meanwhile, is the strongest artefact in the list, and it proves less than it looks: that a formal statement follows from its axioms under the stated assumptions, not that the formal statement says what the plain-language claim says. Translating between the two is a human judgement, and it is exactly the judgement the advisory group has not been asked to make.
The reaction, and the arithmetic of 100 problems
Engagement on Reddit was heavy and imprecise. A thread on r/singularity titled "OpenAI solved 100 open problems in math" drew roughly 1,200 points and more than 470 comments; a follow-up image post called "It's Over For Shape-Rotators" drew roughly 690 points and about 340 comments. Automated extraction from Reddit is blocked, so treat both figures as approximations — and note that the thread title asserts something the announcement does not. The page reports a count produced inside the company; it does not list 100 solved problems. The gap between a number in a headline and an artefact anyone can check is now a genre of its own, and the same gap shaped the reception of Altman's math ladder earlier this month.
What would settle it
Turning "more than 100" into mathematics is unglamorous and mostly mechanical: a list of the problems, statements of the results, writeups, and Lean certificates where they exist, released where outsiders can read and compile them, and then the ordinary process of experts finding mistakes and prior art. The advisory group is well placed to demand that material, but its first brief is dissemination logistics, and it holds no authority over whether the results are released at all, or when. Three things are worth watching from here: the group's first published recommendation, any itemised list from OpenAI, and whether independent mathematicians get to examine the results before the next aggregate figure arrives. OpenAI calls the group "a first step". On the page as written, the pace stays OpenAI's call, and the hundred problems stay OpenAI's claim.
