Who Taught the Machines Mathematics?

On the knowledge we passed on, and what has become of it On October 6, OpenAI released more than seven hundred mathematical manuscripts produced by an internal AI system, some accompanied by formal proofs in Lean and others at different stages of verification. I could not bring myself to go through the list of papers. I was reminded of 2021, when I chaired the FOCS program committee and roughly four hundred submissions arrived over a couple of days. Then, I was excited to see what my community had produced. In this case, it felt like a package had been dropped from Mars. I clicked on a few problems I had cared about in the past but did not read much further. I felt a strange disconnect, and my curiosity was not enough to overcome it. In May, I wrote an essay called The Branch and the Wish about what might happen to mathematics when machines could produce the very things by which mathematicians have long measured their achievements.