Empiricism comes for mathematics: AI's open-problem solutions unsettle mathematicians
manoelribeiro · x · 2026-10-13
Manoel Horta Ribeiro's essay analyzes the math community's grief after OpenAI released shoddy, verbose solutions to major open problems, with PhD student Sophie Maclean describing it as mourning. Key points:
- Mathematicians' grief differs from engineers': proofs were never market-facing products; the discipline's pressures are internal, self-defining what is meaningful and elegant.
- AI breaks a long-standing alignment between what mathematicians valued and what produced important results, as a more empirical approach to math takes over.
- ML went through the same shift a decade ago, and empiricism won — math may follow.
The piece opens with the 1974 Deligne/Grothendieck Weil conjectures story, using Grothendieck's problem-solving philosophy to illuminate the present moment.
Related event: AI-Generated Proofs Leave Mathematicians in Collective Grief(2 posts)→
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