Scientific American reports:

OpenAI’s newest chatbot may be a whiz at math, but it seems to be lagging far behind humans in its academic rigor.

Last week the company announced 10 more artificial-intelligence-generated math advances that were found during internal development and testing of its next major large language model. This batch of results came from that LLM, Astra, and each one resolves or progresses a different “long-standing open problem” of “substantial interest” to the mathematical community. The company said that the total token cost was a mere $2,000.

The news quickly spread as yet another harbinger of AI’s promise—or threat—of outpacing humans to become a dominant, disruptive force in math and computer science. But over the days following the announcement, as flesh-and-blood experts poured over the nearly 250-page paper in detail, many grew frustrated.

Two of the most exciting results, the experts say, incorporate preexisting ideas from the recent mathematical literature without properly citing them. This contradicts OpenAI’s initial press release, which said that the problems Astra addressed “have been open and seen no progress on the main result for at least a decade.” (OpenAI has since updated the language to be more accurate).

“They are running roughshod over the work of others who came before them in a deliberate way,” says Steven Miller, a mathematician at Yeshiva University, who argues that OpenAI has effectively plagiarized his own research. “It seems completely systematic to me, and it points to research misconduct.” [Continue reading…]