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What did it cost and how much energy was spent?

How about instead, we reject the premise that OpenAI should get away with being lazy and incompetent by dumping a bunch of slop and letting researchers do all the work for free, while they still get credit?

If they want to pretend that they can do maths, they should do maths.

Yet another embarrassment. If only they had had access to a group of mathematicians willing to offer them advice on what to do with their outputs.

> The result is also contained in a paper [8] released by OpenAI on October 6, 2026, in which the proof strategy and specific choices of notation are identical to a preliminary version of the present paper that was uploaded to ChatGPT on September 8, 2026.

Make of those claims what you will; knowing now how they operate and how they are happy to take chat logs and convert them into new papers that they claim credit for, there's at least a non-zero probability that that's what happen here.

And imagine being completely fine with the risk of stealing work from students to produce marketing material. Who cares about their career prospectives anyway.

They already had to withdraw three of the manuscripts and correct several others. Who knows how much broken stuff there's in there; unfortunately they were too lazy to check themselves.

It's a well-established fact that Llama simply can't write comprehensible maths, and it's one of the major reasons that OpenAI are catching the flak they are. Dumping the manuscripts in their current form is a sign of laziness and incompetence.

And you're right, it's not really a theme around here, but there aren't that many mathematicians around HN. Check one of the maths forums and it'll be a common point of complaint.

Look at how actual researchers are currently using the tools: they'll generally use the LLMs to create slop papers, sometimes supported by auto-formalizations, just like OpenAI does. Then they will go through the lengthy process of digesting the results, turning the often incomprehensible and poorly organised outputs into something that humans can understand and build upon, they will then give seminars on the results, further helping with dissemination. Doing so still requires expertise, and probably will for a good while.

So yes, that is exactly what they should do. Alternatively, if they are too lazy or incompetent to put in the effort themselves, do what AGMAI proposed and fund a third party to help out.

In the context of maths papers, the term has come to refer to papers having the shortcomings that are, for whatever reason, typical of LLM out, including things like using non-standard terminology all over the place, emphasizing easy steps while leaping over harder ones, having bizarre organisation, and, importantly, failing to properly cover existing work and as a result being hard to tell from plagiarism.

The degree to which these issues feature will differ, but it is generally the case that converting the output to proper research requires significant effort, hence the AGMAI recommendations being what they are, and not performing that effort tends to come off as laziness or incompetence, so I can see how slop has become the popular term.

Regarding the advisory group, OpenAI claims to “have drawn on their advice”, which would include not dumping a bunch of AI slop, with the footnote that if they do do that, at least fund the process of digesting it.

At the same time, there's a new note at the bottom of agmai.org stating how they've been in contact with OpenAI about this particular release, and they say that “we consider these discussions constructive, it is ultimately up to the mathematical community to assess the extent to which our recommendations were followed successfully”.

So, what's going on there; is this British English for “they didn't follow anything at all”? Because from my perspective, it looks like they doubled down on the Navier–Stokes approach of trying to maximize PR gain while being as lazy as possible about actually contributing anything back to science, releasing only slop that may or may not be correct and may or may not be straight up plagiarism, as has been the case earlier.

If I were on the AGMAI board, I'd feel terribly exploited when reading that press release, yet their response is modest.

Hairer, if you're reading this: is there any indication whatsoever that AGMAI was anything but a cheap way for OpenAI to science-wash their press release?

I think it's fantastic that they decided to follow the AGMAI advice. Cleaning up their mess will be a substantial endeavour, so I imagine the funding provided to do so will reach well into the millions. But it doesn't look like the press release says anything about how they will fund it at all?

Because they apparently lack the internal compentencies to do so (or, given that they now have a Fields medalist on payroll, it's probably more a case of not feeling any need whatsoever to spend the effort it takes; maths isn't exactly profitable if you can't mine it for PR). Ignoring all the ethical violations they made in the process, the fact that they only ever released slop on the Navier–Stokes problem is part of the debacle.

For example, had they decided to put their paper on arXiv, they would be facing a 1 year ban, followed by not being able to put anything on there without prior peer review.