OpenAI donates $5 million to try and make peace with distraught mathematicians

OpenAI is donating $5 million to try and placate mathematicians, many of whom are distressed by the company’s recent announcements.

The donation will go to a project, run by the maths-focused Simons Foundation, intended to “help mathematicians examine, understand, and build on results produced by AI”.

OpenAI has received considerable scorn from mathematicians, after it published a huge amount of research in the field that had been produced by an experimental and unreleased model.

The controversy began last month, when it published what it said was “milestone” work on the Navier-Stokes equations, which describe the movement of fluids and have troubled mathematicians for 90 years. But it prompted criticism from some mathematicians, who said that OpenAI may have relied on unpublished work to make the findings.

It further intensified last week, when it announced that an experimental model had produced more than 372 new results. All of them represented substantial work on some of the most important unanswered questions in maths and computer science, it said then.

But it prompted outcry from mathematicians, many of whom said that the publication – and the way that OpenAI had gone about it – had undermined some of the central ways that the field works. “If OpenAI wanted to destroy the mathematical community, this would be a great way to go about it,” said Cambridge professor Henry Wilton in the wake of OpenAI’s announcement.

Many said that the way that by choosing to publish the results in one big release, and by not giving mathematicians a proper amount of time to pick through them, they had undermined the processes that allow the field to check through work. Professor Wilson also suggested publication was a “basic financial injustice” because “their hugely valuable models learned to reason by copying the very reasoning that our community made available for free”.

Even in its initial announcement, OpenAI had suggested that it was aware the publication would be controversial. In a low-key blog post that was headline “sharing AI progress in mathematics”, it claimed that it “want[s] to directly empower scientists” and committed to helping experts work through the consequence of its findings.

Many mathematicians said that the community would need to come together to decide on new norms for the field, in the wake of both the announcement and the apparent improvement in AI’s ability to produce mathematical proofs. Ilya Kazachkov, from the University of the Basque Country, said for instance that the “magnitude” of the announcement “indicates that the changes to our profession are likely to be very profound”.

Now, after that intense outcry, the Simons Foundation said that it has received donations from OpenAI and Anthropic to fund work to “help the mathematics community navigate the rapid rise of artificial intelligence in the field”. In all, the effort will cost $15 million.

“We want to support the mathematics community in turning progress in AI into deeper human understanding and new discoveries,” OpenAI said in a post on X. “To support that goal, we are contributing $5 million to a new Simons Foundation initiative to help mathematicians examine, understand, and build on results produced by AI, including the results we recently published.”

The money will pay for “workshops, conferences, and special programs”, OpenAI said. “We will also provide access to our models and computing resources to Simons Foundation-supported researchers.”

The Simons Foundation said that it would “manage and award the funding, including through an open call for proposals, to support workshops and initiatives that help researchers evaluate recent AI-assisted results, learn and use new tools, share perspectives and shape collective standards for AI use”.

“As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes the research landscape, we want to help the mathematical community come together and forge the best path forward,” said David Spergel, the president of the foundation. “Now is the time to look at mathematics as a whole — not as a collection of proofs and theorems, but as a collective understanding driven by human curiosity.”