Published on
After causing an uproar among mathematicians, ChatGPT maker OpenAI is donating millions of dollars to a maths foundation.
The move comes days after the Association for Human Mathematics (AHM) slammed the artificial intelligence company and alleged plagiarism for solving a decades-old math problem.
In September, OpenAI said an unreleased AI model had cracked a major result on the Navier-Stokes equations, which apply Newton’s second law of motion to fluids, a problem that has stumped mathematicians for almost a century.
But, according to TechCrunch, two human mathematicians say they were close to a similar result, and they question whether OpenAI’s work drew on theirs. OpenAI denies seeing their work. One of the mathematicians, Levent Alpöge, works at Anthropic and was collaborating in a private capacity.
The Sam Altman-led company said on October 6 the model had published more than 700 manuscripts and produced almost 400 other mathematical results, which aimed to tackle some of the most complex questions in maths and computer science, according to OpenAI.
AHM said “Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done,” adding that OpenAI had a “total disregard for the norms of scientific research”.
On Thursday, OpenAI announced on social media site X that it would make a $5 million donation to the maths-focused Simons Foundation, intended to “help mathematicians examine, understand, and build on results produced by AI”.
“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 (€4.5mn) 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 initiative totals $15 million in combined funding and resources from the Simons Foundation, Anthropic and OpenAI.