Litt: "mathematicians have a lot of exciting work to do"; flags a citation problem and questions 'progress' claims

Daniel Litt (Toronto; visiting Harvard) posted a long series of reactions on Oct 6–7 (UTC):

• 22:47 UTC (this post, ~55k views): "Fun! Looks like mathematicians have a lot of exciting work to do." One result is "a (very special) case of a conjecture of mine", which also follows from stronger work in progress by his student.
• 23:21 and 23:27 UTC (https://x.com/littmath/status/2107612354779177181, https://x.com/littmath/status/2107613805970649306): "Section conjecture over Q_p is pretty interesting to me!" and "Hilbert's 10th for \mathbb{Q} is pretty cool!"
• 23:26–23:28 UTC, replying to Andrew Curran (https://x.com/littmath/status/2107613613523443989, https://x.com/littmath/status/2107614048703615453): the results labelled "progress" on famous conjectures "seem like a stretch"; he is "skeptical" that a fundamental obstruction has been overcome.
• 23:38 UTC (https://x.com/littmath/status/2107616410897678765, ~4.5k views), reporting an error: "Proof of Bloch's conjecture! ... Paper seems to cite some wrong existing work without mentioning it's wrong :-/ but AFAICT doesn't meaningfully rely on it."
• 01:53 UTC (https://x.com/littmath/status/2107650528310337840): a list shared by Elliot Glazer "seems like slop to me tbh"; he also notes many results are partial progress (https://x.com/littmath/status/2107650992334389363).
• 02:45 UTC (https://x.com/littmath/status/2107663654963621962): asks roon whether "every single one" of the problems came from an OpenAI researcher's curiosity, since one is "some random conjecture of mine"; roon replied he did not know the provenance of every problem and might delete his post (https://x.com/tszzl/status/2107673761688494180).
• 03:33 UTC, to Dan McAteer's "nuclear bomb" post: "I don’t feel like a nuclear bomb hit; I feel pretty good actually." (https://x.com/littmath/status/2107675636697358456) He also told Scientific American he sees "no reason why we should ask the company to keep them secret from us".

Sentiment: positive about the results, sceptical of hype and of 'progress' framing.

Fun! Looks like mathematicians have a lot of exciting work to do. If I understand correctly one of the results is a (very special) case of a conjecture of mine, which is also a consequence of stronger work in progress by a student of mine.

Quoting @OpenAI: We’re releasing a broad range of new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model.

We’ve been consulting with the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Advanced Study, and we have drawn on their advice and

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