3 ms·

From what I understand, none of the people involved here are originators of the idea that led to this solution. Not Buckmaster nor Alpöge nor OpenAI. All of the

by slibhb 23d ago

From what I understand, none of the people involved here are originators of the idea that led to this solution. Not Buckmaster nor Alpöge nor OpenAI. All of the above were using LLMs to push other mathematicians' ideas forward (Diego Cordoba and Luis Martinez-Zoroa; named in the linked document). I don't know how the math community handles this but normally I would think if X mathematician comes up with an idea and Y mathematician uses it to solve some problem, Y would get credit. But does that change if Y heavily relied on LLMs? I suppose we're going to find out.

reasonableklout 23d ago
You're right that the case is not so clear cut since both sides were using LLMs. And yet it's still being seen as a major confrontation between the mathematical community and the AI industry because Buckmaster is a prominent member of the community and has taken pains to follow mathematical norms while OpenAI has not (with the most flagrant violation being the insistence on removing Alpöge from authorship, simply because of corporate affiliation), and is more nakedly threatening human ownership with capital (the OAI blog post says the final result involved 10,000 concurrent agents). Regarding credit assignment when LLMs are involved, the mathematical community has organized around some rough principles. Gowers has some thoughts on his blog (https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/07/26/thoughts-about-the-leiden-declaration/#:~:text=For%20example%2C%20if,of%20the%20credit https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/07/26/thoughts-about-the-l...) about how explaining a result may be more deserving of credit than producing it. It looks like Buckmaster and Alpöge were taking their time in understanding their results and writing them up when OpenAI forced them to publish their work-in-progress. At the same time OpenAI has published their own writeup but it's not really clear to me how involved humans were.

by slibhb 23d ago

reasonableklout 23d ago

You're right that the case is not so clear cut since both sides were using LLMs. And yet it's still being seen as a major confrontation between the mathematical community and the AI industry because Buckmaster is a prominent member of the community and has taken pains to follow mathematical norms while OpenAI has not (with the most flagrant violation being the insistence on removing Alpöge from authorship, simply because of corporate affiliation), and is more nakedly threatening human ownership with capital (the OAI blog post says the final result involved 10,000 concurrent agents). Regarding credit assignment when LLMs are involved, the mathematical community has organized around some rough principles. Gowers has some thoughts on his blog (https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/07/26/thoughts-about-the-leiden-declaration/#:~:text=For%20example%2C%20if,of%20the%20credit https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/07/26/thoughts-about-the-l...) about how explaining a result may be more deserving of credit than producing it. It looks like Buckmaster and Alpöge were taking their time in understanding their results and writing them up when OpenAI forced them to publish their work-in-progress. At the same time OpenAI has published their own writeup but it's not really clear to me how involved humans were.