"These machines move by sudden jumps or clicks from one quite definite state to another.These states are sufficiently different for the possibility of confusion between them to be ignored.Strictly speaking there, are no such machines.Everything really moves continuously"-A.Turing

So the choice here is between being toothless and spineless?

It looks unserious and it's bad for the reputation of mathematicians. AI companies will do what is good for AI companies and it's better to accept that rather than to release a toothless letter condemning them for it.

I think in the former case it's a bigger ask, since it involves asking the AI companies to do something that is somewhat against their incentives. AI companies are happy to give out models to academics already.

So we should be OK with AI labs misleading the public, and mathematicians, about the level of autonomy/human input because it would be against their financial interests?

It would have been a bit more balanced if you had also called for the AI labs to 'clearly acknowledge substantive human assistance in AI generated proofs' no?

So the second coming of the machine gods fanatics suddenly realized that religion might pose a problem.

This is outrageous framing. Quite frankly, given the current tensions around AI and mathematics, this kind of announcement does not help. After the recent Buckmaster/OpenAI dispute over scientific credit and provenance, the last thing we need is more promotional PR language that blurs the history of a research problem. Meta presents its work by asking: “Can AI contribute when a problem is genuinely open and without an existing solution path?” Seriously?! For the ellipsoid-fitting example, this is misleading and insulting. There was an established research programme, substantial rigorous progress, and by the time of their announcement, publicly available proofs of the exact threshold. Let us be specific: - In 2023, Antoine Maillard and Dmitriy Kunisky gave a statistical-physics derivation of the conjectured transition at n/d² = 1/4, using the replica method. Their analysis also predicted the geometry of the solutions and suggested directions for rigorous proofs. This was not a proof, but it was a detailed and successful theoretical picture, not an absence of a path. arxiv.org/abs/2310.01169 - Afonso Bandeira and Antoine Maillard then rigorously established the sharp threshold for approximate fitting, using methods inspired by the statistical physics of disordered systems, using actually spin glass mathematical technics. Their preprint appeared in 2023 and was published in the Electronic Journal of Probability in 2025. Their Gaussian-equivalence framework provided a foundation for further work (including many of mine!). At this point, the "exact" fitting and removing the spectral restriction were the outstanding gaps, but these are technical problems, it was not about not discovering the threshold from scratch. arxiv.org/abs/2310.05787 - On 10 August 2026, Theodor Misiakiewicz and Garrett Wen posted a proof of the exact Gaussian threshold, explicitly closing those two gaps. arxiv.org/abs/2608.10184 - On 12 August, Sofia de la Cerda, Aaron Potechin, Madhur Tulsiani and Jeff Xu posted another proof, establishing both sides of the transition up to a vanishing multiplicative factor. arxiv.org/abs/2608.12415 - On 27 August, Frederic Koehler and Youngtak Sohn posted a broader universality theorem that includes the Gaussian threshold. arxiv.org/abs/2608.27372 These were not researchers merely “on the verge” of solving the problem. THE PROOFS WERE ALREADY PUBLIC. Meta's announcement comes in October, and Section 3 of their paper begins: “We use the groundbreaking approximate-fitting theorem of Bandeira and Maillard…” Dear META: Those are your words. This is not simply a reference in the bibliography: your feasibility proof explicitly starts from their theorem. How is that consistent with advertising this example through the suggestion that there was “no existing solution path”? Yes, your social post mentions independent solutions, and your paper and blog identify the August results and describe your work as independently developed. That does not answer the objection to the framing. A generic acknowledgement of parallel work does not make clear that the exact threshold already had publicly available proofs before this announcement. An independently developed AI-assisted proof, released after other proofs, should be presented as exactly that. Readers should not have to reconstruct the chronology to understand what is, and is not, new. A new proof can contain valuable ideas. But a new proof and a newly solved problem are not the same claim. Nor does a problem being open when a project begins mean it is still open when the marketing campaign launches. You say the aim is to “empower researchers”? Nothing more “empowering” than seeing years of collective research turned into the backdrop for a cheap marketing stunt. Correct the announcement! Give the scientific history the same prominence as the product. Give Antoine, Afonso, Theo and all the other researchers involved the public credit they deserve.

NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious. Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s advisers “to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.” Pope Leo XIV held firm. For months, Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. thelettersfromleo.com/p/nyt-…

"The nervous system is certainly not a discrete-state machine." - Alan Turing

What prestige and paychecks? - nowadays it is much more prestigious and lucrative to baby sit a model to solve a problem than solving it yourself.

The bots and labs are what they are, but I believe mathematicians instead of trying to appease the labs should let them realize how big and deep mathematics really is on their own - it ususally is a highly educational even transformative experience.

"a science produced with a view single to its applications is impossible; truths are fruitful only if they are concatenated; if we cleave to those only of which we expect an immediate result, the connecting links will be lacking, and there will be no longer a chain.”- H. Poincaré

Can this dystopia get any worse?

Anthropic's discovery of array-associated reverse transcriptases? Turns out it was already done by a Danish scientist. He used Claude for administrative tasks, but not in an agentic manner for the discovery. He already filed a patent and gave talks on it nytimes.com/2026/09/27/scien…

I wonder at which point the Amodei and co realized that natural stupidity was a much safer bet than artificial intelligence.

Nothing can beat the exquisite experience of digging though a solid block of math slop...

"Slow travel has its compensations: things become more concrete. Ideas ripen only in conjunction with the development of the concrete problems which they are destined to illumine; and that is good so." - Hermann Weyl

"They offer desperate, high-paced times. In such times do the opposite: slow down, observe, reflect. And then, after not too long: stand up and fight." - from Rulers of the childless land: A response to the AGMAI by Vladimir Lazić proofsandprompts.com/2026/09…

If you believe that one can significantly alter/steer a models behavior by a system prompt/motivational speech either you or the model is dumb - as usual not excluding the possibility of a double positive.