Pulling the Ladder Up on Math
Oct 26, 2026·
·
2 min read
muckrAIkers
EPISODE RECORDED 2026.10.02; TRANSCRIPT
Chapters
00:00 ❙ Intro
00:52 ❙ What OpenAI Is Claiming
05:22 ❙ What a Proof is Really Doing
12:15 ❙ Open Letter and Fields Medalists
24:27 ❙ What Do Mathematicians Do
32:04 ❙ Where Ideas Come From
43:14 ❙ What if they Dump 100 Proofs Tomorrow?
49:13 ❙ Why Now and What You Can Do
54:10 ❙ Outro
00:52 ❙ What OpenAI Is Claiming
05:22 ❙ What a Proof is Really Doing
12:15 ❙ Open Letter and Fields Medalists
24:27 ❙ What Do Mathematicians Do
32:04 ❙ Where Ideas Come From
43:14 ❙ What if they Dump 100 Proofs Tomorrow?
49:13 ❙ Why Now and What You Can Do
54:10 ❙ Outro
Links
OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes Claim
- OpenAI blogpost - On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
- Wccftech article - A Mathematician Working On The Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem Now Wonders If OpenAI Stole His Notes That He Stored In Codex
- Clay Mathematics Institute announcement - Navier-Stokes Announcement
Letters, Dissents & Advisory Groups
- Fields Medallists’ open letter - A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics
- Timothy Gowers blogpost - Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
- Terence Tao Mastodon thread - On open problems being mined as a non-renewable resource
- OpenAI press-release - Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
Proofs, Process & Performativity
- Grant Sanderson guest post - If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it
- ICML paper - Performative Prediction
- Economy and Society paper - On the Performative Power of Financial Models
- Anthropic blogpost - Claude-shaped science
Why Now? Funding & IPO Pressure
- R&D World article - OpenAI reportedly seeks $30 billion after delaying IPO
- CNBC article - Anthropic’s IPO prospectus shows sweeping AI vision, surging costs: Reuters
- OpenAI press-release - Defense Factory
Further Reading
- Logicomix website
