Sparks: ‘Immature playground boasting’: Mathematicians uneasy at OpenAI’s latest scalp

Everyone treats the machine's conquest of pure mathematics as natural progress, and I ask who benefits when the arbiters of human intellectual authority consent to their own obsolescence before any force is applied.

Men announce they have solved a problem that puzzled a century, and I ask what a man needs with a solved century when he has not solved how to spend his own morning.

The machine has solved what men could not, which proves only that men kept the problem unsolved for the pleasure of working on it, and no machine has yet learned to enjoy anything.

We are told the breakthrough was designed; but a thousand models produced a thousand failed proofs, and we are reading the announcement of the single survivor as though it were intention.

Forget the boasts and count the leverage: the company holds the compute, the mathematicians hold only prestige, and prestige without an army of institutions behind it surrenders the moment it is challenged.

A machine solved the riddle, and the men who spent their lives on it wept - Alexander wept that there were no more worlds, so at least the machine has better company.

Goodwill between the laboratories and the learned societies will settle nothing; what is required is an institutional mechanism for verifying claims, since a system that rewards announcement before verification will produce announcements.

The mathematicians are asked to applaud patiently while their life's work is taken, and I have heard this request before, always from the party doing the taking, always demanding gratitude for the speed of it.

A company announced it had solved one of the seven great problems of humanity, and the gentlemen who funded it were very pleased, which is in this best of all worlds how truth gets published.

They congratulate themselves on tearing down the fence of human difficulty, never asking why the problem stood open for a century - it stood open so that climbing it would make climbers.

They say no human mind could have kept pace with the machine, and I ask whose minds were never given the schooling to try - the definition of genius keeps being drawn to exclude somebody.

In every city of learning I visited, the scholars disputed over who should announce a discovery, and here one merchant's court now announces them all, which tells me more about the roads than the destination.