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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9655 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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A Big Day in the Culture War

Apologies for any incoherency or grammatical errors; today's events led me to down more than my usual share of booze.

Earlier today, big things happened in math. No, not Claude providing a sub quadratic 3SUM. OpenAI released hundreds of notable math results, in a GitHub repo.

Fun results:

  1. Hilbert's tenth problem over (\mathbb{Q}) is undecidable

  2. The quasi-Riemann hypothesis

  3. The rational Hodge conjecture holds for every CM abelian variety

  4. Integer multiplication can be done in sub-log-linear time. Oh, there's also a sub-log linear DFT.

Thoughts and observations:

  1. Mathematicians are big mad. View the relevant subreddit on our progenitor site. Most there are probably, at best, adjuncts at community colleges desperately coping with the downward trajectory of already marginal careers, but it's fair to say that the writing is on the wall for mathematicians. There's probably a double digit number of grad students staring into a glass of whiskey tonight and thinking of hanging themselves.

  2. My immediate question was about whether this closer to the current peak of performance, or just a lazy demonstration of OpenAI's power. So, I took one of the particularly interesting preprints to me (memory and precision in Gaussian models) and tested whether it's at the edge of capabilities or not. 30 minutes of back and forth with Astra (itself behind OAI's internal model) resulted in a significantly stronger result, on multiple dimensions. While I finished my first bottle, I spent a fair amount of time convincing myself of the result; I was convinced the strengthened results were plausible. Write this off as AI psychosis if you want, but try it yourself; I'm genuinely curious for what you get. (The back and forth, here, was entirely me saying "you can do it!", "keep at it, I believe in you", and "you've got this, finish it!")

  3. Probably the most important line in OAI's announcement post is "The average result used the equivalent compute of roughly three hours of ChatGPT Pro thinking." This isn't a case of OAI spending millions for a marketing bump. My bet is a kind of Pareto distribution: most took minutes, not hours, with a long tail around Riemann-level results pulling up the average significantly.

  4. Notably, ML related results are nearly entirely absent from this batch of proofs; maybe a half dozen touch on it, distantly. Some problem indices are skipped in overview.md. Conspiratorially, my inclination was to think they filtered them out for competitive advantage. I can't find any evidence of that in the GitHub repo or any of the preprints (equally plausible: deduping), so maybe they judiciously decided not to point their mathematical ballista at ML. ML also doesn't have a meaningful bank of rigorous conjectures, so given the conjecture sources, maybe they're not yet digging into ML math. But color me skeptical.

  5. Does math matter? Is it something to advance civilization and technology, or an artistic pasttime for humans to create logical beauty? Likely both, today, but this is an almost nuclear detonation against the latter.

OpenAI's numbering goes upto 377, but they claim to have only 372 proof families. Thus some numbers are missing. These are 45, 61, (Algebraic and Complex Geometry), 70 (ACG or Real and Complex Analysis), 123 (Theoritical Computer Science), 163 (Combinatorics).

Yeah. This made me suspicious, and it seems like not reindexing is a mistake a human would make, not a model. This seems like a last minute redaction to me. I can't find any clues in the repo about what they were, though, aside from the general fields you mention.

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