oai-math-revised: mathematicians launch a community hub to revise OpenAI’s AI-written math manuscripts (guest post on Tao’s blog)
Confirmed
The takeaway
On 24 Oct 2026 Terence Tao’s blog ran a guest post by Abhinav Nellore, Johannes Schmitt, Soledad Villar and Rachel Ward announcing oai-math-revised (github.com/mathcommunity/oai-math-revised), a community fork of OpenAI’s 6 Oct release of AI-written maths manuscripts.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 25 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra177 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5116 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon207 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7146 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 116 days before it.
Key facts
- Announced 24 Oct 2026 as a guest post on Terence Tao’s blog ‘What’s new’. Authors: Abhinav Nellore, Johannes Schmitt, Soledad Villar, Rachel Ward
- Stated motivation (README and post): ‘OpenAI’s math write-ups can be difficult to understand and can have incomplete citations. This repo seeks to be an inclusive effort to improve these write-ups’
- Repo github.com/mathcommunity/oai-math-revised was created 10 Oct 2026. On 25 Oct it had 27 stars, 7 forks and about 21 pull requests. Its description: ‘Math is of the people, by the people, and for the people, and we will cite the people.’ A website (mathcommunity.github.io/oai-math-revised) lists the papers by discipline, with a page per paper
- How to contribute: pull requests that edit the TeX (literature reviews, related results, exposition, errors), issues, and per-paper NOTES.md files that log contributions, follow-up works, reviews and people interested in ‘digestion’ meetings. Contributors must ‘disclose substantial use of automation (via language models, proof assistants, and other mathematical software)’
- The fork’s copy of OpenAI’s README describes 719 manuscripts in 372 families, with ‘~42% top-line results formalized’ in Lean
- Early merged PRs (24 Oct) add follow-up works to papers: David Harvey’s note on integer multiplication below n log n (family 109), Kevin Shu’s blog exposition (nonspectrahedral hyperbolicity cone) and Mario Bonk’s Quasiworld talk (Cannon conjecture paper)
- Blog comments: objections to unpaid volunteers improving a for-profit company’s manuscripts, a worry that the revised texts will become training data, a note that several organizers work in ML / AI for maths, and a proposal (Kunal Relia) for a tag marking overstated contributions, citing the Unique Games family (102) and Khot–Regev 2008
What happened
OpenAI’s 6 Oct release put hundreds of AI-written manuscripts on GitHub. OpenAI warned that unformalized results “could have issues” and said it was “exploring community-hosted repositories for these materials”. Two and a half weeks later, four mathematicians made such a community fork public with a guest post on Terence Tao’s blog. The fork asks students, postdocs, professors and enthusiasts to add literature context and citations, improve exposition and flag or fix errors. Changes go through GitHub pull requests and per-paper notes, and the activity shows on a browsable site. The post gives no counts of revisions or errors found so far.
Why it matters
This is the first organized attempt by research mathematicians to digest and credit the OpenAI catalogue. The workflow treats AI-written papers as drafts that need human literature review and attribution before they count as mathematics. The comments show the tension: some see it as needed hygiene, others as free labour for a company, or as a source of training data.
Sources
4 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 3 primary, 1 reaction
Primary
- GitHub: mathcommunity/oai-math-revisedgithub.com, code
- oai-math-revised website (papers by discipline)mathcommunity.github.io, docs
- GitHub: openai/math (the original release)github.com, code
Reactions
- Tao’s blog (guest post): oai-math-revised: a community hub for revising OpenAI’s math write-ups (24 Oct 2026)terrytao.wordpress.com, discussion
Changes
- Filed (repo stats read from the GitHub API)