Sam Altman sympathizes with mathematicians, but says OpenAI’s math onslaught won’t stop

After months of bombarding mathematicians  with a relentless stream of AI-generated results, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he sympathizes with researchers struggling to make sense of it all. But he has no intention of stopping — and hints there could be much more to come from the company’s stockpile of discoveries.

“I think, on net, the world deserves to understand how the universe works,” Altman said during an episode of the Cheeky Pint podcast released Thursday. “But I do have empathy for the method.”

[Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMsUcCYNKqY]

His comments mark one of the first times the OpenAI chief has directly acknowledged the company’s impact on mathematicians, following a string of genuinely impressive AI-generated results whose chaotic, poorly communicated rollouts have left researchers bewildered and struggling to keep up, even amid widespread excitement about AI’s potential as a tool for discovery.

Altman argued that the public’s right to new scientific knowledge “outweighs” the disruption caused by OpenAI’s releases, though he acknowledged the company needs to improve how it communicates its findings. “I feel unequivocal on this point: Humanity deserves fundamental knowledge, and we should not be sitting on a major fundamental science discovery,” he said. “The world deserves that.”

Mathematicians speaking to The Verge have repeatedly criticized OpenAI for how it announces its results, citing inadequate attribution, little context, and insufficient verification. Researchers say this has left them doing the painstaking work of checking and making sense of their findings even as the company presses ahead with more. This month alone, OpenAI has released hundreds of mathematical results, often with little more than brief writeups that researchers have described as poorly written and hard to follow.

Yet OpenAI is now facing criticism for doing precisely what Altman says it should not be: sitting on potentially significant findings. Mathematicians and scientists speaking to The Verge this week said they are frustrated by what they see as OpenAI’s gatekeeping of research, following the announcement of three major breakthroughs in mathematics, physics, and computer science. Details for one of the claimed results —  involving Yang-Mills theory, the mathematical foundations of modern particle physics — have not been released publicly. OpenAI says it is due to the recommendations of a hand-picked group of experts it consulted on how best to release it. The practice runs directly counter to the advice of a previous group of mathematicians the company consulted, but forms part of what the company says is a new approach to communicating its findings.

On the podcast, Altman hints that OpenAI is sitting on many more mathematical discoveries than it has made public, too. Asked whether the company has more than the hundreds of proofs they have already released, Altman replied: “We do. Of course.”

Altman also acknowledged that OpenAI’s pursuit of mathematical problems did “get out of control” for a short period of time, but said that was deliberate and necessary to probe the limits of its AI models. He described an internal Slack channel called “Model Name-Hold My Beer,” where employees “were just throwing that at the hardest problems they could” to see how the models would perform.

Altman also estimated that OpenAI has spent in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars tackling mathematical problems, including around $10 million — “maybe a little more” — on its Navier-Stokes solution, one of mathematics’s legendary Millennium Prize problems. The spending offers a glimpse of the vast resources AI labs are bringing to bear on scientific problems, raising concerns among researchers that they may be priced out of their own fields.

It looks like mathematicians and other researchers hoping for a breather may be out of luck.