OpenAI's latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI's latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say

#11

Post by dodslaser » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:16 AM UTC

ndriscoll wrote: post #6

With machine automated formalizations now feasible, I wonder whether git repos (which would automatically include attribution) wouldn't make more sense as modern journals. e.g. you could have the core mathlib as the "prestige" journal, and then various "results in X" repos as more niche journals? If a theory or result becomes central enough, it is elevated to the core. Peer review becomes a PR, etc. "Journals" could…

I don't think lack of technological progress is responsible for the sorry state of scientific publishing, and I certainly don't think anyone wants to publish in a high-impact journal because Springer/Elsevier's publishing model makes sense.

Re: OpenAI's latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say

#12

Post by chrisjj » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:29 AM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #8

chrisjj wrote: post #2

Paywalled.

Is it? Seems to work for me?

Thanks.

I got a bar with: A Subscription Is Required to Continue Reading.

Then I deleted cookies, and now that's gone.

Re: OpenAI's latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say

#13

Post by ratorx » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:43 AM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #9

ofjcihen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean are they wrong to want credit? This isn’t like “I brought coffee to the meetups and corrected some spelling errors” but more like OAI pulling the “you made this? I made this” meme.

You can dig through every single paper and find some citation that was missed. No one cares that much unless the result is important, and then you get bitter recriminations saying that it was stolen or plagiarized. Tale as old as time. See e.g. Schmidhuber, who has a long list of vendettas against people he thinks stole his work.

The existing, human standards are based on human capabilities. Humans may not have read all the papers that could be cited. However, all these papers are almost certainly in the AI’s training set and it potentially has the ability to retrieve them over the internet into its context. Why shouldn’t we expect the AI to cite more comprehensively?

It seems more like a goal-setting problem, than an actually novel one. But a paper with lots of citations is not as “cutting edge”, so maybe doesn’t make sense for marketing reasons.