Jack Rae on OpenAI's math drop: the exponential hasn't stopped and we never feel ready
jack_w_rae · x · 2026-10-08
Former research lead Jack Rae reacts to OpenAI's latest math result, calling it an amazing moment for scientific progress:
- Two years ago the community was scaling LLM reasoning toward a moonshot goal of beating competitive high-school math (IMO gold); that milestone flew by, and world-class mathematical problem solving arrived about a year later.
- In his view the exponential hasn't stopped, and "we never feel ready for it."
- Secondary musing: reality may be messier than intuition suggests — perhaps a hideously expensive polynomial-time algorithm lurks out there that can decide an NP-complete problem.
Related event: OpenAI Drops 372 Math Proofs, Splitting Mathematicians(83 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Scott Aaronson's math commentary sparks debate: which fields are 'safe' from AI? — Leading-Obligation74 · 2026-10-08
- We're in the very early days of computing — expect plenty of surprises ahead — cephaloform · 2026-10-08
- Psych researchers predict AI will break peer review and reshape social science publishing — steverathje2 · 2026-10-08
- Peter Yang: AI Can Decompile and Rebuild Any Software, SaaS's Moat Is Eroding — petergyang · 2026-10-08
- Vitalik: AI-accelerated math could seriously break lattice crypto within two years — StefanoGogioso · 2026-10-08
- MoMath panel asks: what does AI solving open math problems mean for the field? — stevenstrogatz · 2026-10-08