Mathematician pushes back on OpenAI's 10,000-agent, 88-hour Lean proof: certificate without understanding
_onionesque · x · 2026-10-13
Mathematician Alexander Gamburd's arXiv essay reflects on OpenAI's 166-page, 616,000-line Lean proof produced in 88 hours by 10,000 agents and read by no human. He argues proofs have historically been both a truth certificate and a demonstration of why — and accepting the former without the latter amounts to a Hobbesian bargain where authority, not truth, governs, auguring a 'Middle Ages in reverse' for mathematics.
More from AGI Musings
- Veteran game programmer calls hand-coding era "golden age" as AI now writes most code — rickasaurus · 2026-10-13
- Mathematicians' latest problem: what if AI can do our job? NYT Daily examines — stevenstrogatz · 2026-10-13
- As AI topples math problems, mathematicians split between awe and dread — LostBetsRed · 2026-10-13
- 1 in 5 books substantially written by AI now, growing from ~0% of sales in early 2023 to ~20% — TuhinChakr · 2026-10-13
- Paper: AI-written books flood Amazon, crowd out human authors' sales — TuhinChakr · 2026-10-13
- John Langford on scale threshold effects in AI research, citing the NextLat paper — JohnCLangford · 2026-10-13