OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician
NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster has accused OpenAI of using its massive computing resources to race to a proof for a math problem after learning of his team's progress. OpenAI has denied the allegations, calling them false and inflammatory.
Why it matters
This dispute raises ethical questions about the intersection of academic research, corporate competition, and the use of AI in scientific discovery.
NYU mathematics professor Tristan Buckmaster announced three proofs on Tuesday with a preliminary finding on one of the major unsolved problems in theoretical mathematics. The findings, made in collaboration with Anthropic mathematician Levent Alpöge and using both Codex and Claude AI models, are significant in themselves — but they’re also accompanied by an unusual controversy surrounding OpenAI’s attempts to solve the same problem.
“There is another part of this story,” Buckmaster wrote in his statement announcing the proofs, “and one that, honestly, I very much wish I did not have to be concerned with.”
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