OpenAI Faces Another Controversy Over Mathematical Achievement: Accused of Potentially 'Stealing' a Major Mathematical Proof

Beating AI News Flash: OpenAI Astra's mathematical breakthrough is once again mired in controversy. Mathematician Andreas Thom recently published an article questioning whether, during the training of Astra, OpenAI may have absorbed the content of conversations left behind when he and mathematician Gábor Kun conducted research around the Gromov soficity conjecture, after which Astra went on to solve a highly related problem.

The Gromov soficity conjecture is an important long-standing unsolved problem in group theory, and Thom has studied it for 20 years. When OpenAI announced Astra's "Top Ten Mathematical Breakthroughs" in August this year, the third item was precisely the construction of a non-sofic group. OpenAI previously said the related results were completed by an internal version of Astra, but after being questioned by the mathematics community, it revised its statement and acknowledged that the proof relied on recent mathematical work including research by Kun and Thom.

At present, there is no evidence proving that OpenAI did indeed use the relevant private conversations to train Astra, but Thom's accusation has once again pushed issues such as the sources of AI training data, the attribution of unpublished research results, and whether "AI discoveries" are built on unpublished human achievements to the forefront.

If the relevant accusations are ultimately confirmed, the incident will no longer be merely an academic authorship dispute, but may evolve into a major storm involving AI companies' data use, research ethics, and intellectual property rights.